Roudaki

Roudaki or his full name is Abdollah Jafar Ibn Mohammad the founder of Perso-Tajik literature. Roudaki was born in 858 CE in the Pandj-Rodak village near Pandjikent, a settlement between Samarkand and Bokhara (in Transoxiana, central Asia). From early childhood, he began writing verses, was fond of playing the lute (chang in Persian), and had a beautiful voice. He was one of the first poets to use the newly devised Persian alphabet, a transcription of the Pahlavi language using Arabic letters. 

A Brief History of Persian Literature

The Persian Language

The Old Persian of the Achaemenian Empire, preserved in a number of cuneiform inscriptions, was an Indo-European tongue with close affinities with Sanskrit and Avestan (the language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts). After the fall of the Achaemenians the ancient tongue developed, in the province of Pars, into Middle Persian or Pahlavi (a name derived from Parthavi - that is, Parthian). Pahlavi was used throughout the Sassanian period, though little now remains of what must once have been a considerable literature. About a hundred Pahlavi texts survive, mostly on religion and all in prose. Pahlavi collections of romances, however, provided much of the material for Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.