Simon Digby (oriental scholar)

Simon Everard Digby (17 October 1932 – 10 January 2010) was an English oriental scholar, translator, writer and collector who was awarded the Burton Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society and was a former Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, the Honorary Librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society and Assistant Keeper in the Department of Eastern Art of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He was also the foremost British scholar of pre-Mughal India.

The author of several books, including translations from Indo-Persian and a study on Sultanate-era military history, as well as over 60 academic articles and book chapters, Digby was also highly regarded as a collector. He was a prolific reviewer of academic books, the reviews themselves described as "probing and erudite" in a 2022 volume devoted to his method and legacy. William Dalrymple described him as "fabulously eccentric" and "the sort of independent scholar who no longer exists"; in an obituary, the historian Irfan Habib characterised him as "a scholar different from all others in the attention that he paid to the minutiae and curiosities of history". At his death, he left behind a large body of unpublished work, which the trustees of his estate have arranged to be edited and posthumously published.