is Emeritus Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies at SOAS University of London

Nicholas Sims-Williams studied Iranian languages, Sanskrit and Syriac at Cambridge, obtaining his PhD with an edition of a Sogdian miscellany of Christian texts translated from Syriac. Since 1976 he was on the staff of SOAS, University of London, retiring as Emeritus Professor of Iranian and Central Asian Studies. His research focuses on the Middle Iranian languages of Afghanistan and Central Asia, and on the documents and literature written in those languages. His publications include four volumes of Bactrian documents in the series "Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum" (2001–2025) and five volumes of Christian Sogdian texts in the series "Berliner Turfantexte" (1985–2019), as well as dictionaries of both Manichaean and Christian Sogdian. His most recent book is "An Old Khotanese Reader: The Tale of Bhadra" (2025).