Dick Davis (translator)

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Dick Davis (born 1945) is an English–American Iranologist, poet, university professor, a vocal dissident critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and award-winning translator of Persian verse, who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry.^[1]

Born into a working-class family shortly before the end of World War II, Davis grew up in the Yorkshire fishing village of Withernsea during the 1950s, where an experimental school made it possible for Davis to become the first member of his family to attend university. Shortly before graduating from Cambridge University, Davis was left heartbroken by the suicide of his schizophrenic brother and decided to begin living and teaching abroad. After teaching in Greece and Italy, in 1970 Davis decided to live permanently in Tehran during the reign of the last Shah. As a result, he taught English at the University of Tehran, and married Afkham Darbandi, about whom he has since written and published many love poems, in 1974. After the Islamic Revolution, Dick and Afkham Davis fled to the United Kingdom and then moved to the United States, Davis began translating many of the greatest masterpieces of both ancient and modern Persian poetry into English.

Davis is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been called, by The Times Literary Supplement, "our finest translator from Persian." Davis' original poetry has been just as highly praised. Davis' poetry collections have been 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.