 Shirin Akiner was born in 1943 in Dacca, British India.She studied at London University, gaining a first degree in Slavonic philology and Turkish language and literature (Ottoman and Modern).She gained her doctorate in 1980 from University College London as a researcher of the heritage of the Belarusian Lipka Tatars, with her dissertation titled "The religious vocabulary of the British Library Tatar-Byelorussian Kitab".