English poet Stevie Smith was BOTD in 1902. Born Florence Smith in Kingston-upon-Hull in Yorkshire, her father abandoned the family when she was a child, and she spent three years in a sanatorium being treated for tuberculosis. After her mother’s death in 1918, Smith lived for the remainder of her life with her aunt, and worked as a secretary for a publishing house. She published her first novel in 1936, before finding success the following year with her debut poetry collection A Good Time Was Had By All. She became one of the most admired poets of her generation, winning the Cholmondeley Award and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Her work combined a preoccupation with death, loneliness and strained family relationships, infused with mordant wit and studied eccentricity. She is best known for her poem Not Waving but Drowning, the title poem of her 1957 collection. Feminist scholars have praised her subversion of gender norms and feminised rewritings of myths and legends. Smith never married and appears to have had no intimate relationships. Biographers have speculated that she may have been a lesbian, pointing to the restless unfulfilled sexuality that underscores so much of her work, and her bemused disinterest in men. Smith died in 1971, aged 68. She was played by Glenda Jackson in the 1978 biopic Stevie.