English poet Thom Gunn was BOTD in 1929. Born in Gravesend, Kent, his parents separated when he was a child, and he had a nomadic upbringing, travelling with his journalist father on assignments throughout England. His mother committed suicide when he was fifteen, a tragedy that drove him into an intense study of Victorian literature. He served in the British Army for two years, returning to English to study at Cambridge University, where he formed a relationship with Michael Kitay. His debut poetry collection Fighting Terms, published after his graduation in 1954, was praised for its depiction of love as a form of interpersonal conflict. He moved with Kitay to San Francisco, studying at Stanford University and teaching poetry at UCLA Berkeley. Under the influence of American Modernist poets William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan, his writing became more experimental. American critics were intrigued by his use of conventional poetic forms to describe San Francisco’s burgeoning counter-culture, with poems about the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, queer culture and his use of psychedelic drugs. His friend and frequent reviewer Stephen Spender described his work “as if A. E. Housman were dealing with the subject matter of [Allen Ginsberg‘s poem] Howl, or Tennyson were on the side of the Lotus Eaters.” His life and work was profoundly affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which decimated San Francisco’s gay community. His grief over the loss of his friends was achingly described in his 1982 poetry collection The Man with Night Sweats, widely praised as among the most eloquent literary accounts of the period. After a decade-long silence, he published Shelf Life in 1993, a collection of essays and autobiographical sketches, earning him a MacArthur fellowship. Gunn retired from teaching in 1999, publishing his final verse collection, Boss Cupid, in 2000. He died of heart failure in 2004, aged 74.