Ghan Shyam Singh (24 January 1929 - 12 September 2009) was an essayist, poet, critic and emeritus professor at Queen University Belfast. His extraordinary career linked him to some of the leading figures in English and Italian literature of the second half of the 20th century, in particular Ezra Pound, FR Leavis and the Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale. Together with Pound, in the 1960s, he translated some of the poems of Kabir, a 15th-century Indian poet. He graduated and earned his doctorate from a university in Jaipur, then taught English literature at the universities of Agra and Aligarh before his departure for Italy, where he studied Giacomo Leopardi and taught at various universities such as Bocconi in Milan and the universities of Macerata, Trieste and Urbino. In all he has published over 60 books, including critical works, translations and editions of texts, as well as several volumes of his poetry, both in English and in Italian. After his retirement from Queen University, he was for many years a "visiting scholar" at the National Centre for Leopardian Studies in Recanati, and his work in Italy on the great poet earned him honorary citizenship from the municipality of Recanati in 2001. For health reasons, he moved from Belfast to Surrey in 2005 and remained active almost to the end.