Qatran Tabrizi (; 1009–1014 – after 1088) was a Persian writer, who is considered to have been one of the leading poets in 11th-century Iran. A native of the northwestern region of Azarbaijan, he spent all of his life there as well as in the neighbouring region of Transcaucasia, mainly serving as a court poet under the local dynasties of the Rawadids and Shaddadids. Background Qatran was born between 1009 and 1014 in Shadiabad, near the city of Tabriz in the northwestern region of Azarbaijan. Shadiabad is mentioned as his hometown in one of his verses, which dismisses other accounts, which calls him by the nisbas of Tirmidhi, Jabali, Jili, Urmawi, Ajali. According to the 15th-century Timurid-era biographer Dawlatshah Samarqandi, the name of Qatran's father was Mansur, but this is not supported by earlier sources. Qatran is given the epithet of "Adudi" in several sources, which has been suggested to be a corruption of Azdi, the name of an Arab tribe which the ruling Rawadid dynasty was descended from. Biography Not much is known about the life of Qatran. As a Western Persian who spoke the Iranian dialect of Azari, Qatran had some difficulties in understanding "Parsi" (i.e. Dari), the Eastern Persian dialect of Khurasan. This is mentioned in the Safarnama of the Khurasanian poet Nasir Khusraw when he met him in Tabriz in 1046; "He wrote good poetry, but did not know Persian well. He came to me bringing the diwan of Munjik and Daqiqi, which he read with me, questioning me about every passage in which he found difficulty. I told him its meaning and he wrote it down." Dari contained Eastern Iranian words (such as Sogdian), which were unintelligible to a Western Persian like Qatran. It was seemingly due to this that Qatran composed a lexicon written in Persian, named Tafasir fi lughat al-Furs, which has not survived. His work is mentioned in the preface of the Persian lexicon of his contemporary Asadi Tusi, which was composed for the educated population of Azarbaijan. Asadi never cites any of Qatran's verses in his lexicon, which further underscores that the intention of the work was to clarify the uncommon words used in Eastern Persian. With the reunification of Iran by Seljuk Empire in the mid 11th-century, eastern Persian literature had a better opportunity to sway the western provinces. Qatran seemingly spent all of his life in Azarbaijan and Transcaucasia,