English journalist and writer Christopher Hitchins was BOTD in 1949. Born in Portsmouth to a military family, he grew up in Malta and Scotland before being sent to boarding school in England. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University, joining the International Socialists and had relationships with several of his male classmates. After graduating, he moved to London in 1970, where he wrote for the Times Higher Education Supplement. He quickly established himself as the foremost political journalist of his generation, writing for the left-wing weekly the New Statesman, the Evening Standard and the Daily Express. He moved to New York City in 1981, relocating to Washington to write for the leftist magazine The Nation. He vigorously defended his friend Salman Rushdie over criticisms of blasphemy in Rushidie’s novel The Satanic Verses. His support of freedom of expression and criticism of organised religion became a recurring theme throughout his career. In 1992, he began writing for Vanity Fair magazine, introducing him to a more mainstream American audience. A prodigious critic of authority figures, he published a series of book-length critiques of the British Royal family, the alleged war crimes of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the sexual misdemeanours of President Bill Clinton. His sharpest and most widely-quoted takedown was of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who he called “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud” and accused of supporting dictators. His 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, became a key text for the atheist movement, but was widely denounced as evidence of his Islamophobia. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Hitchins surprised his left-wing fan base by supporting America’s invasion of Iraq and later endorsing President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. In his latter years, he supported same-sex marriage, gun rights and smoking in public, while adopting conservative views on abortion, leading to frequent accusations of being a misogynist. A witty and compelling public speaker, he appeared regularly as a television commentator and on the lecture circuit, often engaging his opponents in political debate. Married twice and with two children, he cheerfully admitted to his youthful bisexuality, joking that his appearance “declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me”. He died in 2011 following a long battle with oesophageal cancer, aged 62. The Hitchins Prize was established in his honour in 2015, to support authors and journalists whose work is committed to freedom of expression.