American writer Dennis Cooper was BOTD in 1953. Born in Pasadena, California, his father was an advisor to conservative politicians including Richard Nixon. Cooper attended private school until being expelled. He attended Pasadena City College, becoming obsessed with the sexually transgressive literature of the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Cocteau. In 1976, he founded punk magazine Little Caesar, publishing contributions from Andy Warhol, Bob Flanagan and Debbie Harry, and established a printing press under the same name. He lived a nomadic existence for the next 20 years, living variously in New York City, London and Los Angeles and working as a journalist, art curator and publisher, before settling in Paris. He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000. Defiantly uncommercial and transgressive, his work describes the visceral underbelly of contemporary urban life, with recurring themes of sexual violence, drug addiction, prostitution and murder. His 2007 novel The Sluts, a disturbing thriller about the murder of underage rent boys, won the Prix Sade and a Lambda Literary Award. In 2016, he attracted publicity after Google deleted his blog and email accounts without warning, following unspecified violations of Google’s terms of use policy. After a two-month standoff, supported by left-wing media and civil liberties groups, Google returned Cooper’s data. Cooper’s latest novel, I Wished, was published in 2021.