English poet Wilfred Owen was BOTD in 1893. Born in Oswestry, Shropshire to a prosperous middle-class family, he studied at Shrewsbury Technical School before being privately tutored. He became a language teacher in France, where he began writing poetry, returning to England as World War One broke out. Enlisting in the British Army, he was sent to the front line, where he was injured in battle. Diagnosed with shell-shock, he was sent to Craglockhart Military Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was treated by the pioneering doctor W. H. R. Rivers. He met and fell in love with his fellow patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon. With Sassoon’s encouragement, he radically changed his poetic style, adopting more experimental forms and plumbing the psychological depths of his war trauma. Through Sassoon, Owen was introduced to a homosexual literary circle, including Robbie Ross, the poet Osbert Sitwell and the translator C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (with whom Owen may have had an affair). He returned to the front line in 1918, assuming command of his company and leading a counter-attack on a German strongpoint. He was killed in November 1918, just one week before the signing of the Armistice. He was 25. A heartbroken Sassoon published Owen’s poems in 1920, causing a national sensation. Breaking with poetic traditions of war as a noble enterprise, his poems Dulce et Decorum Est, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility, Spring Offensive and Strange Meeting described the horrors of trench warfare and condemned patriotic sentiment, revolutionising public perceptions of war. Owen’s letters and diaries were published in the 1930s, censored by his brother to remove references to his homosexuality. In 1987, academic Jonathan Cutbill attacked the academic suppression of Owen as a queer poet, pointing to homosexual references in his poem Shadwell Stair. Now one of the world’s most revered poets, his work has been extensively set to music, notably in Benjamin Britten‘s War Requiem. Owen’s life and friendship with Sassoon has been portrayed numerous times, notably in Pat Barker’s Regeneration novel trilogy. He was played onscreen by Stuart Bunce in the 1997 film of Regeneration and by Matthew Tennyson in Terence Davies’ 2021 Sassoon biopic Benediction.