Czech writer Franz Kafka was BOTD in 1883. Born in Prague, Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was raised in a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. His childhood and adolescence was dominated by his father, a tyrannical patriarch obsessed with material success and social advancement. After teenage flirtations with Socialism and atheism, he studied law at the University of Prague, developing an intimate friendship with fellow student Max Brod. After graduation, he worked for an insurance company, and began writing novels and stories in his spare time. Few of his works were published in his lifetime, notably his 1915 story The Metamorphosis, a surrealist nightmare in which a young man wakes up to discover he has turned into a giant insect, and dies of shame and despair. He struggled for over a decade with tuberculosis, pursuing relationships with a number of women but never marrying and privately expressing a terror of physical intimacy. He died of advanced tuberculosis in 1924, aged 40, instructing Brod to burn his unpublished works. Thankfully, Brod ignored him, publishing his writings throughout the 1920s and arranging for English translations. His novels The Trial and The Castle were bleak portraits of alienated characters in desperate struggle with mysterious authoritarian powers. He became internationally famous, giving eloquent expression to the despair and devastation of post-World War One society. His diaries and unpublished writings revealed homosexual and masochistic fantasies, while the anguish and isolation of his characters have been interpreted by many critics as avatars for closeted homosexual identity. Now considered one of the 20th century’s most influential writers, his work had a profound influence on the work of Modernist and Existentialist writers Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami and the filmmakers David Cronenberg, David Lynch and Julia Ducournau. He was played by Idan Weiss in the 2025 biopic Franz.