Bo Utas got acquainted with Persian literature in secondary school. In 1959 he started to study Persian at Uppsala University for his mentor Henrik Samuel Nyberg and defended his PhD thesis in 1973. His thesis is a critical edition of the Sufimasnavi poem Tariq to-tahqiq which has been ascribed to Hakim Sanai of Ghazna. Utas travelled extensively in Iran and Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1988 he became the first professor in Iranian languages at Uppsala University, a chair that he held until he retired in 2003. Under his supervision, no less than eight PhD candidates defended their theses successfully. Bo Utas is a member of several learned societies, including the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, Societas Iranologica Europaea, and the Royal Society for the Humanities in Uppsala. He was the first secretary of the Societas Iranologica Europaea. Bo Utas knows several languages, including Avesta, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Hebrew and Arabic. A full list of his publications shows his broad and diverse scholarship on Middle Persian and New Persian language and literature, manuscript tradition and text edition, culture and religion in Greater Iran. Bo Utas has translated several Persian classical and modern literary works into Swedish, including the Buf-e kur by Sadeq Hedayat. Bo Utas collected essays on and translations of Persian literature in Swedish has been published with the title Persiska litteraturen: Essäer och översättningar and edited by his pupil Ashk Dahlén.
Selected publications (in English)
The Jewish-Persian fragment from Dandan-Uiliq, Orientalia Suecana 17, Uppsala, 1968.
Tariq ut-tahqiq. A Sufi Mathnavi ascribed to Hakim Sana’i of Ghazna and probably composed by Ahmad b. al-Hasan b. Muhammad an-Naxcavani. A critical edition, with a history of the text and a commentary, Lund: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1973.
On the composition of the Ayyatkar i Zareran, Monumentum H.S. Nyberg II,, Tehran-Liège 1975.
A Persian Sufi poem: vocabulary and terminology. Concordance, frequency word-list, statistical survey, Arabic loan-words and Sufi-religious terminology in Tariq ut-tahqiq , London-Malmö: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1978.
Women in Islamic societies: social attitudes and historical perspectives, London-Malmö: Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies, 1983.
Verbal ideograms in the Frahang i Pahlavik, Middle Iranian Studies = Orientalia Lovanensia Analecta, Skalmowski-van Tongerloo, 16, Leuven 1984.
Jang u asti: War and peace in Iran, in E. Kahrs, Kalyanamitraraganam. Essays in honour of Nils Simonsson, Oslo 1986.
Frahang i Pahlavik, edited with transliteration, transcription and commentary from the posthumous papers of Henrik Samuel Nyberg, with the collaboration of Christopher Toll, Wiesbaden 1988.
The Munajat or Ilahi-namah of ’Abdu’llah Ansari, Manuscripts of the Middle East, Leiden, 1988.
New Persian as an interethnic medium, Ethnicity, minorities and cultural encounters, I. Svanberg, Uppsala 1991.
Arabic and Iranian elements in New Persian prosody, Johanson, L. & Utas, B., Arabic prosody and its applications in Muslim poetry, Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 1994.
Traces of evidentiality in Classical New Persian, Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian and neighbouring languages, Johanson, L. & Utas, B., Berlin & New York, 2000.
The Virgin and her lover. Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel and a Persian Epic Poem, together with T. Hägg, Leiden: Brill, 2003.
