Canadian artist, writer and inventor Brion Gysin was BOTD in 1916. Born John Clifford Brian Gyson in Taplow, Buckinghamshire to Canadian parents, his father was killed in the First World War eight months after Brion’s birth. He and his mother returned to Canada, settling in Edmonton, Alberta. At 15, Gysin was sent back to England to attend private school. In 1934, he moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, and quickly fell in with the Modernist and Surrealist arts scene, socialising with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. He also began to explore Paris’ gay scene (later describing “all those dark underworld passageways of queer sex”) and had an affair with celebrity escort Denham Fouts. At 19, his drawings were selected for an exhibition alongside Ernst, Picasso, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and Man Ray, but were removed on the orders of Surrealist leader André Breton. In later life, Gysin gave various explanations for his expulsion, including his “insubordination” or Breton’s disapproval of his homosexuality. He left Paris, travelling to Greece and Algeria before returning to the United States in 1939 at the outbreak of World War Two. While in New York City, he encountered the final act of the Harlem Renaissance, befriending Carl Van Vechten and Billie Holiday. Conscripted into the US Army during World War Two, he was sent on an 18-month course to learn Japanese, including calligraphy, which became a major influence on his later work. After meeting a descendent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, he published a biography of Josiah “Uncle Tom” Henson, which won him a Fullbright Scholarship. He returned to Paris, intending to research the history of slavery, but was enticed to Morocco by Paul Bowles. He eventually settled in Tangier, opening a restaurant called the 1,000 Nights with nightly performances by musicians, acrobats, dancing boys and fire eaters. (He later gifted his recipe for hashish fudge to Toklas, which became the most famous entry in her 1954 cookbook). In one of the more bizarre collaborations in 20th century history, Gysin, Bowles and the fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent helped create student concerts at the American School of Tangier. After the closure of his restaurant in 1958, Gysin returned to Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse with his lover Salah and the writer William S. Burroughs. Gysin helped support Burroughs through heroin withdrawal, and introduced him to the “cut-up technique” to splice and rearrange written text. Gysin was instrumental in compiling and editing Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch, published to huge acclaim in 1959. The two continued to live and work together, collaborating on an unpublished manuscript The Third Mind. Gysin hit his creative peak in the 1960s, collaborating with English mathematician Ian Sommerville to produce computer-generated poetry, inventing a “dream machine” with a stroboscopic flicker geared to the rhythms of the brain, staging mixed-media events in Paris and publishing his best-known novel The Process. He became friends with Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull and particularly David Bowie, who employed the cut-up technique to write his albums Low and Lodger. In 1974, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, at one point attempting suicide, but continued to work, attracting celebrity disciples including Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Keith Haring and Laurie Anderson. He was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985. Shortly before his death, Gysin released the album Self-Portrait Jumping, co-created with saxophonist Steve Lacy and featuring Gysin singing and rapping his own texts. He died in 1986, aged 70. His final novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously. Now considered the unsung hero of the mid-century avant-garde, his works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Centre George Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.