Dick Davis (translator)

Dick Davis is a British poet, educator and translator.[1] He is professor emeritus of Persian at Ohio State University and previously a Bita Daryabari Professor of Persian Letters at Stanford University.[2] He has received numerous academic and literary awards which have included the Ingram Merrill and Heinemann awards for poetry.[1]

Davis earned a Master's Degree from the University of Cambridge where he was introduced to Persian literature.[2] In 1970, he moved to Iran where he taught at the University of Tehran. He met his wife Afkham Darbandi [3] there. Despite opposition from her traditional Iranian family, they married in 1974 and had an extended honeymoon in Cochin, India. The Davises left Iran for the United Kingdom in November 1978, as refugees from the Iranian Revolution.[4]

His publications include volumes of poetry and verse translation chosen as books of the year by The Sunday Times (UK) in 1989; The Daily Telegraph (UK) in 1989; The Economist (UK) in 2002; The Washington Post in 2010, and The Times Literary Supplement (UK) in 2013. He has published numerous book-length translations from Medieval Persian poetry, most recently, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (2012). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been called, by The Times Literary Supplement, “our finest translator from Persian”.