Dame Freya Madeline Stark was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to have traveled through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times. Ms. Stark was born in 1893 in Paris, where her parents were studying art. She spent much of her childhood in northern Italy, then worked in Italy as a nurse during WW1. Despite a lack of formal education, she had an interest in Arabian culture (which she attributed to 1001 Arabian Nights). After the war, she studied Oriental History in London before leaving to travel extensively across Baghdad, Iran, and the Arabian deserts where no Westerner had ever visited. By 1931, she had completed three dangerous treks into the wilderness of western Iran where Westerners were unknown, and had located the fabled Valleys of the Assassins. She published an account of her explorations in The Valleys of the Assassins (1934).. She received the Royal Geographical Society’s Back Award in 1933 and.in 1934, was awarded the Royal Asiatic Society’s Richard Burton Memorial Medal in recognition of her contribution to geographic exploration and travel writing. When WWII came, she was already stationed in the Middle East so she began to work in Cairo for the British Ministry of Information. She continued to travel across Europe and Asia after the war and was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Ms. Stark was also an accomplished photographer. Over forty of her albums, holding thousands of black-and-white prints and negatives, are held as the Freya Stark Photograph Collection in the archive of the Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College. Many of the photographs were taken with the same Leica camera which she bought in 1933 and used on her travels. They have been published in several books including her own book, Rivers of Time: Photographs by Freya Stark (1982). She passed away in 1993 on her 100th birthday.