In September 2025, Dr Bo Utas was honored with the Mahmoud Afshar Foundation Award (the Afshar Literary and Historical Prizes), a recognition that celebrates scholars who have made enduring contributions to Iranian studies and the historiography of Persian literature. The award underscores both Utas’s sustained scholarly impact and the international appreciation for his textual and linguistic work — a public acknowledgement that his editions, frequency studies and translations have substantially enriched the scholarly infrastructure of iranology. The following is a sketch of his academic career and noteworthy achievements in this regard:
Bo Utas (b. 26 May 1938, Jämtland, Sweden) is one of the leading living scholars of Persian language and literature: a linguist, text editor, translator and historian whose work has deeply shaped modern iranology and our understanding of Middle and New Persian textual traditions. Over a career that spans more than half a century he has combined painstaking manuscript scholarship with broad comparative knowledge — producing critical editions, lexicographical studies, genre-analyses and literary translations that remain essential to specialists and accessible to a wider readership.[1]
Utas’s scholarly formation took place at Uppsala University, where he studied under noted Iranists and defended his doctoral thesis in 1973. That dissertation — a critical edition and commentary of the Sufi masnavi Tariq ut-tahqiq (traditionally ascribed to Sanai) — announced two hallmark features of his method: rigorous philological editing grounded in manuscript comparison, and an interest in the linguistic and cultural history embedded in poetic texts. In an interview with Abdolmajid Mirdamadi, he says:
When I was finishing school, I believed I would continue in the natural sciences. I even began university studies in mathematics. But very soon mathematics revealed itself to me as a dry and emotionless realm, while inside I carried a thirst for poetry, for language. Numbers and formulas could not satisfy that inner longing. So I changed direction and turned instead to languages. First came Latin, and then, little by little, I discovered Persian. The more Persian I learned, the more I was drawn into its poetry — something I have always loved…In 1962 I was fortunate to receive a scholarship from the Faculty of Letters in Isfahan. At that time, Isfahan had no full university, only the faculties of Literature and Medicine. I spent nine months in the Faculty of Letters, and it was wonderfully beneficial. Those months gave me true fluency in Persian. When I returned to Sweden, I began teaching the language, and soon afterward embarked on my doctoral work…
In 1988, Dr Utas became the first professor in Iranian languages at Uppsala, a chair he held until his retirement; during his tenure he supervised a generation of doctoral students who have carried his approach into new subfields of Iranian studies.[2] Two complementary strands run through Utas’s work. The first is historical-linguistic: careful attention to phonology, morphology and the transitions from Old and Middle to New Persian, including quantifying Arabic loan-words and tracking frequency patterns across corpora. This aspect of his scholarship has produced practical reference tools (concordances, word-frequency lists) as well as theoretical essays about language change in the Iranian sphere. The second strand is literary-textual: editions, genre studies and cultural readings of Sufi and epic texts, where his knowledge of manuscript traditions, paleography and intertextual networks allows him to reconstruct how texts were transmitted and transformed across centuries and regions. Together these contributions have helped move iranology toward a more corpus-based, methodologically transparent discipline.[3]
Utas’s publication record is both wide and deep. Notable works in English include collections of essays such as Manuscript, Text and Literature: Collected Essays on Middle and New Persian Texts and From Old to New Persian: Collected Essays, while his critical edition of Tariq ut-tahqiq remains a touchstone for Sufi studies and textual criticism. Beyond monographs and essays, he has produced concordances and frequency lists — resources that other scholars still use as building blocks for corpus studies. He has also translated major Persian works into Swedish – such as The Blind Owl (Den blinda ugglan, 1965), as well as poems by Sohrab Sepehri, Simin Behbahani, and Forugh Farrokhzad – making canonical and modern Persian literature available to Scandinavian audiences.[4]
Utas is a polyglot scholar in the old European tradition, as well as a chess historian: his reading competence spans Avestan, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Turkish and several modern European languages. That linguistic breadth gives his work comparative reach — from studies of Iranian historiography and religious vocabulary to examinations of narrative technique in medieval Persian prose and poetry. He is an active member of many learned societies and has held roles in international organizations for Iranian studies, reflecting his standing in the field.
Beyond the academic CV, Utas’s influence shows in two practical ways: first, in how modern iranologists frame problems about textual transmission and language change (they often begin with manuscript evidence the way Utas demonstrates); second, in pedagogical resources — his concordances and essays are tools for teaching Persian philology at graduate level. In an era when digital corpora and computational methods are reshaping the humanities, Utas’s careful fusion of quantitative (frequency, concordance) and qualitative (close reading, manuscript comparison) work looks prescient: it supplies models for combining humanistic judgment with data-driven inquiry. His career is a model of philological rigor allied with literary sensitivity. From his critical editions and frequency studies to his translations and mentorship of students, his scholarship has materially shaped contemporary Iranian studies. The recent Afshar Foundation Award is therefore less an endpoint than a public recognition of a lifetime of scholarship that continues to inform how we read, edit and understand Persian texts across time.
In His Own Words:
Excerpt from an interview with Abdolmajid Mirdamadi, Iran Newspaper [5]
The greatest Persian work for me has always been Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. My Persian began with Ferdowsi under Professor Nyberg, so the language of Ferdowsi became my Persian. After Ferdowsi came Hafez, who influenced me deeply, then Sa‘di, and of course Khayyam. Khayyam, curiously enough, was once more famous in Europe than in Iran. In fact, it was a small book of Khayyam’s quatrains in Fitzgerald’s translation, beautifully illustrated, that I stumbled upon as a schoolboy in a bookshop. That was my first true window into Persian literature. Later I even wrote a school essay on Khayyam, encouraged by my Swedish teacher, himself a poet. Perhaps that moment, more than any other, steered me away from mathematics and toward Iranian studies…Looking at the field today, I am struck by how strong Iranology has become. The number of investigations, the publication of critical editions — especially of Sufi and qalandar texts — has grown remarkably. Compared with the past, with figures like Said Nafisi, I cannot say today’s work surpasses that era in strength, but it has certainly expanded and deepened…As for the younger generation of Iranians, I cannot presume to offer them advice. But I would say this: it is essential to remain engaged with your own culture and the values rooted within it. Do not rush after every new fashion or foreign import. Cultures are always in flux; they borrow from one another, but what comes from outside is never pure — it is always mixed. This does not mean you should reject all things foreign, but you must remember that your culture grows from its own roots. Protect those roots, and preserve your own culture.
Selective Bibliography
Tariq ut-tahqiq: A Sufi Poem of Sanā’ī. Diss. Uppsala University, 1973. [Critical edition with commentary and glossary].
From Old to New Persian: Collected Essays. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. [Essays on language history, loanwords, and textual transitions].
Manuscript, Text and Literature: Collected Essays on Middle and New Persian Texts. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2018. [Edition studies, manuscript traditions, literary essays].
“Persian Prose Literature up to 1300.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs, edited by R. N. Frye, 661–696. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. [Foundational survey chapter].
Word Frequencies in Early New Persian. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1982. [Lexicographic and statistical study of vocabulary].
A Persian Sufi Poem: An Introduction to the Study of the Tariq ut-tahqiq. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1977. [Companion volume expanding on his doctoral work].
Selected works of Sādeq Hedāyat (Translation into Swedish). [Introduced modern Persian literature to Scandinavian readership].
+ Numerous articles in journals such as Orientalia Suecana, Acta Iranica, and Studia Iranica, covering manuscript studies, genre analysis, and linguistic transitions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Utas?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Bo Utas”
[2] https://www.uu.se/en/contact-and-organisation/staff?query=XX697&utm_source=chatgpt.com “Bo Utas – Uppsala University”
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Utas?utm_source=chatgpt.com “Bo Utas”
[4] https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/person.jsf?pid=authority-person%3A15847&utm_source=chatgpt.com “Utas, Bo (0009-0008-1492-7890) – uu .diva”
[5] https://www.cgie.org.ir/fa/news/153462/%DA%86%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%BA-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B4%D9%86-%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%87%D9%86%DA%AF-%D8%A7%DB%8C%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86%DB%8C-%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%B3%D8%B1%D8%B2%D9%85%DB%8C%D9%86-%D8%A7%D8%B3%DA%A9%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF%DB%8C%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%88%DB%8C
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