Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1945, and educated at the universities of Cambridge (B.A. and M.A. in English Literature) and Manchester (Ph.D. in Medieval Persian Literature). He lived in Iran for eight years from 1970 to 1978, and also for some time in both Italy and Greece. He was Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University from 2002 until 2012. As well as academic works, he has produced more than twenty books as author, translator or editor; these include translations from Italian and Persian, and a number of books of his own poetry. He is generally recognized as the finest living translator of Persian literature: his translations include Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (with Afkham Darbandi), a collection of medieval epigrams (Borrowed Ware), Pezeshkzad’s novel My Uncle Napoleon, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin, and most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz.

Dick Davis has also contributed an appreciation of Matthew Mead’s poetry to The Autumn-Born in Autumn.