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Nizami Ganjevi, 1141-1209, is considered to be one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature.
He was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan, but his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian Empire and beyond.
Nizam is best known for his Hamsa, a set of five epic poems that contain a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Khosrow and the Christian Princess Shirin.
But he didn't only write romances.
His poetry also displays a dazzling knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, botany and the life of Alexander the Great.
With me to discuss Nizami Ganjevi are Christine Van Rumbacker, professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, Nages Fazad, Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies at SOAS University of London, and Dominic Perviz Brookshaw, professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford.
Dominic, who was Nizamin Kanjavi and what do we know about his early days?
As with many most medieval Persian poets, it's very difficult to say with any accuracy how their life was certainly before they became famous.
So with almost all medieval Persian poets, there is quite a lot of hagiography, there's quite a lot of writing that happens centuries after they've died, that looks back and sees them in a light that of course is full of praise, but isn't necessarily full of much accuracy.
The things that we do know, as you said, he was born in Ganja, which nowadays is in Azerbaijan, and he wrote these really important poems, a number of them, for local rulers, whether they were in Ganja, whether they were in Baku, or whether they were in Maraq, which is in northwestern Iran nowadays.
So he wrote within the Caucasus, he wrote for local elites, and at the time that he wrote, those local elites were powerful in their own right, within their own area, but they were linked into one of the great empires of the time, in his case, the late 12th century, the Seljuks.
And he had contacts with the Seljuk elite, but he was very much a poet writing in the Caucasus and in northwestern Iran as we know it today.
Are we talking about a poet who connected different cultures through his work?
So it's the Caucasus.