Patrick Donald Rayfield (born 12 February 1942, Oxford) is an English academic and Emeritus Professor of Georgian and Russian at Queen Mary University of London. In 2003, he became an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and, in 2010, was awarded the Order of Merit in Georgia.
He is the author of many books, among them The Literature of Georgia: A History; Stalin and his Hangmen; Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia; and “A Seditious and Sinister Tribe”: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate, and served as the chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. He has also published numerous translations of prose, poetry, and drama from Georgian (Otar Chiladze, Mikhail Javakhishvili), Russian (Gogol, Shalamov, Leskov), Uzbek (Hamid Ismailov), and Crimean Tatar (Khan Gazı II Giray). He received the 2019 EBRD Translation Prize for his translation (with John Farndom) of Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance.
