Hakīm Abu l-Qāsim Firdawsī Tūsī (Persian: حکیم ابوالقاسم فردوسی توسی), more commonly transliterated as Ferdowsi (or Firdausi), (935–1020) was a highly revered Persian poet. He was the author of the Shāhnāmeh, the national epic of Iran as well as other Persian speaking communities in other countries.

Ferdowsi was born in 935 in a village near Tus in Khorasan which is situated in today's Razavi Khorasan province in Iran.

The son of a wealthy land owner, his great epic, the Shāhnāmeh ("The Epic of Kings"), to which he devoted more than 35 years, was originally composed for presentation to the Samanid princes of Khorasan, who were the chief instigators of the revival of Iranian cultural traditions after the Arab conquest of the seventh century.
Front facade of the Ferdowsi's mausoleum in Toos. The tomb was made during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi by the national heritage association.

When he was just 23-years old, he found a “Shāhnāmeh” written by Abu-Mansour Almoammari; it was not, however, in poetic form. It consisted of older versions ordered by Abu-Mansour ibn Abdol-razzagh. The discovery would be a fateful moment in the life of the poet. Ferdowsi started his composition of the Shahnameh in the Samanid era in 977 A.D During Ferdowsi’s lifetime the Samanid dynasty was conquered by the Ghaznavid Empire.

After 30 years of hard work, he finished the book and two or three years after that, Ferdowsi went to Ghazni, the Ghaznavid capital, to present it to the king. There are various stories in medieval texts describing the lack of interest shown by the new king, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, in Ferdowsi and his lifework. According to historians, Mahmud had promised Ferdowsi a dinar for every distich written in the Shahnameh (60,000 dinars), but later retracted and presented him with dirhams (20,000 dirhams), which were at that time much less valuable than dinars (every 100 dirhams worth 1 dinar). Some think it was the jealousy of other poets working at the king’s court that led to this treachery; the incident encouraged Ferdowsi's enemies in the court. Ferdowsi rejected the money and, by some accounts, he gave it to a poor man who sold wine. Wandering for a time in Sistan and Mazandaran, he eventually returned to Tus, heartbroken and enraged.