Dame Freya Madeline Stark DBE (31 January 1893 – 9 May 1993) was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer.

She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays.

[2] Stark spent much of her childhood in northern Italy, helped by the fact that Pen Browning, a friend of her father, had bought three houses in Asolo.

[4] For her ninth birthday, Stark received a copy of One Thousand and One Nights and became fascinated with the Orient.

When she was thirteen, in an accident in a factory in Italy, her hair was caught in a machine, tearing her scalp and ripping her right ear off.

[5] At the age of 30, hoping to escape her life as a flower farmer in northern Italy, Stark chose to study languages at university.

[7]During World War I, Stark trained as a VAD and served initially with G. M. Trevelyan's British Red Cross ambulance unit, based at the Villa Trento near Udine.

After her trip, Stark wrote about the repressive French regime and the abuse inflicted on the Syrian people in an English magazine.

[15] Her prior experience in the Middle East was sufficient for the Ministry to send her to Yemen to spread propaganda on the British cause.

Part of her duties involved showing films, despite the rulers of Yemen being strict Muslims who disapproved of any images of humans and wildlife.

Following her arrival in June 1940 she set up an intimate salon where, over tea four times a week, she advocated for the British cause.

Before long, Christopher Scaife who was teaching English at the King Fuad I University was sending her the odd Egyptian student who wanted to know what the British were fighting for.

Stark encouraged them to bring their friends and the discussions expanded to cover not only the war but also its effects on Egypt.

These discussions grew to become the basis of the Ikhwan al Hurriya (Brotherhood of Freedom) propaganda network that was aimed at persuading Arabs to support the Allies or at least remain neutral.

After driving it from Delhi to Teheran, she sold it, but officials in Cairo and Aden took a dim view of her taking upon herself to dispose of government property in wartime.

Autobiography 1939–1946 (1961), and she published a history of Rome on the Euphrates: The Story of a Frontier (1966) and another collection of essays, The Zodiac Arch (1968).

In her retirement at Asolo, apart from a short survey, Turkey: A Sketch of Turkish History (1971), she busied herself by putting together a new collection of essays, A Peak in Darien (1976), and preparing selections of her Letters (8 volumes, 1974–82; one volume, Over the rim of the world: selected letters, 1982), and of her travel writings, The Journey's Echo (1988).

[19] Some forty-plus of her albums, containing approximately 6,000 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.

[22] Smaller collections of photographs by Stark are held at the Biblioteca Berenson, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies Repository,[23] in the Harry Ransom Centre, the University of Texas,[24] at the Special Collections of the University of New South Wales, Canberra,[25] and in the Conway Library whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project.

[1] 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.