Scottish writer and broadcaster Damian Barr was BOTD in 1976. Born in Belshill in Lanarkshire to a working-class family, he survived an abusive childhood at the hands of his mother’s boyfriend. He studied at Lancaster University, becoming the first member of his family to graduate from university, discovering therapy and community during an exchange year at University of Texas at Austin. After graduation, he became a columnist for The Times of London in 1991. His comic observations on post-graduate life were collated into the 2006 book Get It Together: How To Survive Your Quarterlife Crisis. In 2008, he launched Damian Barr’s Literary Salon at Shoreditch House in London, boozy live events where he interviewed writers about new releases. He is best known for his 2013 memoir Maggie and Me, a portrait of his coming-of-age during the tenure of anti-gay Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Critically and commercially acclaimed, it won the Sunday Times Memoir of the Year and Stonewall Writer of the Year, and was successfully adapted for radio and the stage. His 2016 debut novel You Will Be Safe Here contrasted a Boer family incarcerated in a British-run concentration camp in South Africa with a teenager who is abused and killed in a paramilitary reform school, based on the real-life murder of 15 year-old Raymond Buys. He is also the creator and presenter of TV book shows Shelf Isolation and The Big Scottish Book Club for BBC Scotland, and has hosted BBC Radio 4’s Front Row interview show. In 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, he became unexpectedly famous for his Twitter post “We are not all in the same boat. all in the same storm. Some of us are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.” It became one of the year’s most-quoted aphorisms, reported in the Wall Street Journal and Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul Podcast and inspiring the 2021 film The Same Storm. He also drew headlines in 2020 for his criticism of Baroness Nicholson’s appointment as Honorary Vice-President of the Man Booker Prize, citing her opposition to same-sex marriage laws and transphobic comments on social media. Barr lives in Brighton with his husband Mike Moran, with whom he raises chickens. His novel The Two Roberts, a fictionalised portrait of mid-century Scottish artists and lovers Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, was published in 2025.