American writer Nelle Harper Lee was BOTD in 1926. Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she grew up next door to the young Truman Capote, becoming lifelong friends and collaborators. In 1949, she moved to New York, taking itinerant jobs while pursuing a writing career. She accompanied Capote to Kansas in 1959, helping him research a local murder case that became the basis of his 1966 bestseller In Cold Blood. In 1960, her novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published, a coming-of-age drama about a pre-teen tomboy named Scout growing up in Depression-era Alabama, whose father Atticus Finch defends a Black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman. Scout’s friend and neighbour, a precocious sissy named Dill, was based on Capote. (Capote returned the favour, portraying the young Lee as the tomboy Idabel in his 1948 debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms). A national bestseller, To Kill a Mockingbird won Lee the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was successfully filmed in 1962 starring Gregory Peck as Atticus, and became an instant classic of American literature. Horrified by her newfound celebrity status, Lee retreated to Alabama, refusing to give interviews or make public appearances, and published nothing for 50 years. She made a rare public appearance in 2007, to receive the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, the United State’s highest civilian honour. In 2015, Lee’s publishers released the novel Go Set a Watchman, based on an unpublished manuscript of Lee. Advertised as the sequel to Mockingbird, it followed the adult Scout as she returns from New York to visit Atticus in Alabama. It became an immediate bestseller, though received a mixed critical responses, generating significant controversy as to whether the 89 year-old Lee had fully consented to its release. Lee died in 2016, aged 89. Lee’s sexuality, like much of her life, is shrouded in mystery. Many of her readers have noted queer resonances in her non-gender conforming characters, and in Boo Radley, the misunderstood recluse in Mockingbird who embodies the queer space of the “Other”. Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the 2005 film Capote and by Sandra Bullock in Infamous, both dramatising Lee’s friendship with Capote as they researched In Cold Blood.