or Niẓāmī orig. Ilyās Yūsuf Niẓāmī Ganjawī
born с 1141, Ganja, Seljūq empire
died 1209, Ganja
Greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature.
Little is known of his life, except that he spent it in what is now Azerbaijan. Only a handful of his qaṣīdah s (odes) and ghazel s have survived; his reputation rests on his great Khamseh ("The Quintuplet"), a group of five poems totaling 30,000 couplets, in which he brought a colloquial and realistic style to the epic. The fourth poem, The Seven Beauties , is considered his masterpiece.