Prof. Christopher Shackle

Prof. Christopher Shackle retired in 2007 as Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia after 40 years on the academic staff of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he was Pro-Director from 1997 to 2003. Originally graduating in Persian with Turkish from the University of Oxford, he came to specialise in the languages, literatures, and religions of South Asia. His wide ranging publications in these fields include The Siraiki Language of Pakistan (1976), A Guru Nanak Glossary (1981), An Introduction to the Sacred Language of the Sikhs (1983), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa (with Stefan Sperl, 1996), and Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition (with Leonard Lewisohn, 2005). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and was awarded the medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2004 and the Sitara-i-Imtiyaz from the government of Pakistan in 2005. Since he retired, his translation from Panjabi of the Sufi lyrics of Bullhe Shah appeared in 2015 as the inaugural volume of the Murty Classical Library of India, where it was followed in 2018 by his English version of the classic Sindhi poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai.