Hazhir Teimourian's Website
Hazhir Teimourian is one of the best-known commentators on the Middle East. He gives hundreds of radio and television interviews each year to major Western broadcasters, from ABC in Australia to NBC and CBS in the United States.
He was born in Iranian Kurdistan in 1940 and at the age of nineteen came to England to study. In 1968, he became a broadcaster with the Persian Service of the BBC in London and stayed there until 1980, when he was invited by The Times to join it as a writer specialising in the Middle East. During the crisis of the eviction of Iraq from Kuwait, he wrote a daily column in The Times and was employed by BBC Television News as one of its main commentators. During the second Iraq war, he was a mainstay of Britain’s ITN and contributed to many others, including the BBC. Since 1996, he has been a freelance writer and commentator.
His Biography of Omar Khayyam (the eleventh century Persian free-thinker, mathematician and poet) was published in November 2007 and he is a founder member of the Limehouse Group of Analysts.
He has installed an ISDN Radio Studio at his home and is in 2010 working on a new history of the Kurds for a major publisher.
"His exposure of Iran's human rights record is devastating"
New York Times editorial, April 10, 1989.
"Only Hazhir Teimourian warned us all these years of the ambitions of Saddam Hussein"
The late Brian Redhead, Today Programme, BBC Radio Four, autumn 1990.
"Your column in The Times is the first thing I go to every morning"
David Steel, leader of the Liberal Democratic party, London, February 1991.
“Critics’ Choice (his autobiographical talks on BBC Radio Four). He is a natural broadcaster, if ever there was one”
The Times, August 1998.
"You're the only commentator on the Middle East I believe."
Sir Tom Courtney, actor - 2003.
"A respected commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Hazhir Teimourian’s Omar Khayyam is a work of considered scholarship and tremendous imaginative sympathy”
Justin Marozzi, The Spectator, 24 November 2007.
"Evocative, informative and unusually moving”
BBC departmental chief on his Radio 4 programme Something Understood, The Consolations of Autumn. October 25, 2009.
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