Peter Avery was a notable Persian scholar and orientalist at Cambridge. His knowledgeable affection for Iran, underpinned by his years’ working in the country and his wide network of well-placed contacts, informed his writings about Iranian and Persian culture and affairs. An even broader readership was acquainted with his translations of Omar Khayyam and the 14th-century poet Hafiz.

Peter William Avery was born in Derby in 1923, and educated at Rock Ferry High School, Birkenhead. His undergraduate education, at the University of Liverpool, was interrupted by the war, in which he served from 1941 as a lieutenant in the Royal Indian Naval Volunteer Reserve (his father had been a merchant seaman).

It was in India that he began to learn Persian, his lifelong interest in Persian poetry having been kindled by his being introduced as a child to FitzGerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam. He said his immediate motive for learning Persian was to read the poems of Hafiz in the original.

Demobbed in 1946, he resumed his undergraduate career, this time at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, reading Arabic and Persian. After graduating in 1949 he spent nearly ten years in Iran and Iraq. He worked initially as an educational liaison officer for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co (AIOC), a source of employment and the first experience of the country for many other British students, such as the Cambridge orientalist Laurence Lockhart before him.

Iran was about to enter the turmoil of the attempted nationalisation of the oil industry by the Prime Minister, Dr Muhammad Musaddiq. Avery’s account of this crisis, “What One Man Can Do”, in his book Modern Iran (1965), is a far more nuanced and sympathetic than those of most of his contemporaries, and reveals the deep understanding of Iran and its political culture that he had already acquired.Although it was written in an impersonal manner, numerous asides provide telling signs of his own awareness of events, and of his penetration into Persian society. Speaking of 1950, he writes, for example: “In those circles where poets and intellectuals were wont to smoke opium . . . nasty rhymes about the Shah and his family were being recited and chuckled over, as opposition to him crystallised in cliques which represented an odd mixture of modernism and traditionalism, in a blending only a country like Iran could produce.”

The AIOC withdrew its personnel in 1951, and Avery found work in Iraq, first as assistant professor at the Iraqi Royal Military College and Staff College (1951-52) and then at the Baghdad College of Arts and Sciences (1952-55), mainly teaching language.

After the Shah’s return to power on the fall of Musaddiq, large development programmes were undertaken, among them a £30 million road reconstruction project. In 1955 Avery returned to Iran as assistant to the general manager of Mowlem, the civil engineering company supervising the work. Political manoeuvring proved, however, to be a barrier to progress, and the construction project no doubt proved a frustrating job, although Avery made many friends and contacts in Iran in literary circles and among the political élite.

He was well placed, therefore, when the post of lecturer in Persian became vacant at the University of Cambridge, to impress his interviewers, and especially A. J. Arberry, the Professor of Arabic, with many shared interests. In 1958 Avery was matriculated by King’s College, taking his MA and becoming a senior member of the university. A fellowship at King’s followed in 1964.

In many ways Avery had come home. Already, as a student at SOAS, he had embarked on translating some of the ghazals of the great 14th-century mystical poet, Hafiz of Shiraz, after being approached by the English poet, John Heath-Stubbs, who wanted to know what Hafiz had said.

Thus started a fruitful collaboration, which resulted first in their joint publication, in 1952, of Hafiz of Shiraz. Thirty poems: an Introduction to the Sufi Master. In their introduction they acknowledge the assistance of, among others, G. M. Wickens, and Arberry’s Fifty Poems of Hafiz (1947), which contained a selection of his own and others’ translations.

Avery, in other words, was now part of a network of academic interests in Iran far more vibrant than exists today. An important element in this was the brilliant Russian scholar, Vladimir Minorsky, Professor of Persian in London, who retired to Cambridge in 1944 and remained there until his death in 1966. Avery was a regular visitor to his house in Bateman Street and benefited from Minorsky’s presence to read and discuss historical texts, and incidentally to be caught up in Minorsky’s twinkling irony on the merits of Arberry’s own prodigious output.

It is not surprising that someone of Avery’s intelligence and enthusiasm for his subject flourished in this creative atmosphere. In 1962 he contributed to the advanced Modern Persian Reader while on leave from Cambridge in the US, and this was followed in 1965 by his Modern Iran.