Freya Stark

British-Italian explorer, photographer and travel writer who penned more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times.

Some forty plus of her photography albums, containing approximately 6000 black and white prints, together with some 50,000 negatives are held as the Freya Stark Photograph Collection in the archive of the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford.

She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1972 New Year's Honours.

In 1947, at the age of 54, she married Stewart Perowne, a British administrator, Arabist, and historian, whom she had met while working as his assistant in Aden early in World War II. Perowne was homosexual, which Stark did not know when they first married, although most of his friends did. Their marriage had many troubles, and Stark did not adjust well to being the wife of a civil servant. The couple had no children, separated in 1952, but did not divorce.

She died at Asolo on 9 May 1993, a few months after her hundredth birthday.