English poet and translator Paul Roche was BOTD in 1916. Born in Mussoorie, a hill station in British-controlled India where his father was an engineer, his mother died of smallpox when he was nine. Despatched to England to be educated, he studied at Ushaw College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Durham, and completed degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Ordained as a Catholic priest in 1943, he moved to London to take up a curacy in a parish church. In 1946, he met the painter Duncan Grant while crossing a street in London. Grant invited Roche to pose nude for him, and they quickly became lovers, to the understandable frustration of Grant’s then-partner Vanessa Bell. Perhaps wisely, Roche left the priesthood, forming a relationship with Mary Blundell, with whom he had a son. Tired of playing second fiddle to Grant, Blundell left him soon after. In 1954, Roche married the American student Clarissa Tanner, with whom he had four children. The publication of his debut novel O Pale Galilean helped gain him a teaching post at Smith College in Massachusetts, where he taught alongside Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. He became well-known for his translations of Plautus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sappho, which became standard texts in American universities. After Bell’s death in 1961, Roche returned to England, primarily to look after Grant. Tanner and the children followed, settling in Berkshire, as Roche lived a nomadic existence, shuttling between their family home, Grant’s house in Sussex and teaching stints at American universities. Tanner appears to have accepted Roche’s relationship with Grant, even allowing Grant to live with them in his final years. In the mid 1960s, Roche found success with two collections of poetry, All Things Considered and To Tell the Truth, attracting praise from poet Stephen Spender and performing in public readings with the actress Sybil Thorndike. In 1971, he released the extremely strange spoken-word album Paul Roche – A Poet. A Man. A Mind. After Grant’s death in 1978 and his divorce from Tanner, Roche moved to Majorca in Spain. In his later years, he published accounts of his visit to Turkey with Grant and a six-month backpacking trip through India with his adult daughter. He died in 2007 aged 91.