R. E. Asher

R.E. Asher is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, where in addition to his teaching and research appointment he also held senior administrative posts. He has published books on the literature of the French Renaissance (the field of the first of his two doctorates), on the history of linguistics, and on contemporary Malayalam literature, grammars of Tamil and Malayalam, and translations of five Malayalam novels. He is editor-in-chief of the prestigious ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (1994) and of the Atlas of the World’s Languages (1994). In 1983 he was elected Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi and in 2000 was appointed member of the General Council of the Tamil Sahitya Academy, Chennai. In Kerala he is particularly associated with the work of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, both of whom became close personal friends. Asher was born in 1926 in the small village of Gringley-on-the-Hill, Nottinghamshire, England.