Peter Avery

Peter Avery OBE (15 May 1923 - 6 October 2008) was an eminent British scholar of Persian and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Born in Derby, he devoted his career to Persian history and literature, contributing major works including Modern Iran and The Age of Expansion and Medieval Persia to English-language scholarship. He is widely known for his translations of classical Persian poetry, most notably his collaboration with poet John Heath-Stubbs on a translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, first published in 1979. With Heath-Stubbs, he also published Thirty Poems of Hafiz of Shiraz, reprinted in 2006. The culmination of his scholarly career was his complete translation of The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, published in 2007, which was awarded the prestigious Farabi Prize and remains the only contemporary complete English translation of Hafiz's lyrics. His translations are characteristically accompanied by extensive scholarly notes explaining textual allusions and the broader literary and religious context the poets assumed their audiences would know.