American writer Annie Proulx was BOTD in 1935. Born and raised in Norwich, Connecticut, she studied at University of Vermont and Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada. Settling in Vermont and later in Wyoming, she worked as a journalist. Her debut short story collection Heart Songs, and Other Stories, published in 1988 when she was 53, was followed by a novel, Postcards, in 1992. Known for her lean prose style and brutally unsentimental depictions of isolated rural life, she attracted a devoted fanbase. Her 1993 novel The Shipping News, a tragicomedy about a lumpish outsider who settles in Newfoundland with his two young daughters, became an unexpected bestseller, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction and was adapted into a film starring the then-fashionable Kevin Spacey. Proulx became the world’s most reluctant literary star, frequently kvetching in interviews about the vagaries of celebrity and its disruptions to her writing schedule. She is best known for her 1997 short story Brokeback Mountain, a flinty melodrama about two male cattle ranchers in 1960s Wyoming who pursue a doomed 30-year love affair. Originally published in the New Yorker, it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the O. Henry Award. An expanded version appeared in Proulx’s 1999 short story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, which was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize. In 2005, Brokeback was adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Ang Lee and starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. A critical and commercial success, it was hailed as a watershed for LGBT representation on screen. Ledger’s performance as the cripplingly closeted Ennis del Mar won particular praise, with Proulx commenting that he “got inside the story more deeply than I did“. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won for Lee’s direction, adapted screenplay and original score, but infamously lost Best Picture to the maudlin race-relations drama Crash. In a savagely funny opinion piece for the Guardian, Proulx compared the homophobic anti-Brokeback protesters picketing the Oscars ceremony to the “conservative heffalump academy voters“, whom she claimed were out of touch with “the yeasty ferment that is America these days“. In a 2009 interview, she expressed regret for writing the story, calling it “the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out“. Her subsequent publications include two further volumes of Wyoming stories and the novels That Old Ace in the Hole and Barkskins. Married and divorced three times and with four children, Proulx identifies as lesbian and lives in rural Washington. In recent years she has championed the work of gay Montanan writer Thomas Savage, whose novel The Power of the Dog was adapted into a film by Jane Campion in 2021.