James Justinian Morier

Born in Smyrna in 1782, he grew up in a diplomatic family and later entered British service in the eastern Mediterranean and Persia. Those years gave him direct experience of court life, travel, and politics in the region, material he would later turn into both travel writing and fiction.

His nonfiction works included accounts of journeys through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, but he is most remembered for The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and its sequel. The novels became widely read in Britain for their fast-moving, picaresque style and vivid portrait of Persian life, even as they also helped spread stereotypes that later readers have questioned.

He died in Brighton on March 19, 1849. Today he is remembered as a writer whose books sit at an interesting crossroads of travel literature, diplomacy, and early English-language fiction about Iran.