American poet and teacher John Ashbery was BOTD in 1927. Born in Rochester, New York to a middle-class family, he showed early promise as a poet, studying at Harvard University where he befriended writers Frank O’Hara, Edward Gorey and Alison Lurie. After postgraduate studies at Columbia University, he worked as a copywriter in New York City. In 1955, he won a Fulbright scholarship, relocating to Paris where he worked as an art critic for the New York Herald-Tribune and the American periodical Art News, and began publishing his own poetry. Returning to the United States in the 1960s, he became Art News’ executive editor, becoming one of the first critics to promote Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement. He settled into a career teaching poetry at Brooklyn College, while continuing to write and publish. His breakthrough came in his 50s with his 1976 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, becoming the first (and to date, only) American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. Known for the density and opacity of his style, he was described as “the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible”. He continued to publish prolifically over the next forty years, gradually dropping the dense experimentalism of his earlier work and adopting a more accessible style. Discreetly gay, Ashbery lived with his husband David Kermani for 52 years, until his death in 2017, aged 90.