Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar

Mohammad-Hossein Shahriar, known by the pen name Shahriar, was an Iranian poet of Azerbaijani origin who wrote in both Azerbaijani and Persian. He was born in Tabriz in 1906 and died in Tehran in 1988. He matters because he helped establish serious poetry in the Azerbaijani language within Iran, and his work reached far across the Turkic-speaking world.

His father, a calligrapher and scholar, taught him at home, starting with Hafez's Divan. He attended the Motahhari school in Tabriz and later the Dar-ol-Fonoun in Tehran. He studied medicine but left before graduating, moving to Khorasan, where he worked as a notary and bank clerk. In 1935 he returned to Tehran to join the Agricultural Bank of Iran. He first published under his given name, Behjat, and later adopted Shahriar. His first book of poems appeared in 1929.

His poetry drew on Hafez of Shiraz for Persian and on Khasta Qasim, an older Turkic poet. Early on he wrote tragic verse full of bittersweet memories. His best-known work, Heydar Babaya Salam (1954), was written in Azerbaijani and became hugely popular in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan; it has been translated into more than thirty languages. He used lyrics, quatrains, couplets, odes and elegies, and his colloquial diction helped him reach a wide audience. His interests also included humanistic questions, as in his poem "A Letter to Einstein", which laments that scientific work had been turned into a nuclear weapon. During the Soviet occupation of northern Iran in 1945-1946 he wrote verse in support of Iran's national unity. Today his day of death is marked in Iran as a national day of poetry, and his legacy continues to be read and sung across the Turkic world.