English psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach was BOTD in 1946. Born in London to a middle-class Jewish family, she studied Russian history before moving to New York, where she completed a degree in women’s studies at City University of New York. After graduating, she opened a series of women’s therapy centres in London and New York with colleague Luise Eichenbaum. She is best known for her 1978 book Fat Is a Feminist Issue, a groundbreaking analysis of women’s relationships to their bodies, offering a blistering critique of the diet industry. Updated and republished several times, it became a cornerstone text for late 20th century feminism. She also published a number of books about women’s roles in relationships and friendships, co-authored with Eichenbaum. Bodies, her 2009 sequel to FIAFI, critiqued the commodification of women’s bodies and the growing fashionability of plastic surgery. During the 1990s, she wrote a weekly column in the Guardian, collected into two volumes, What’s Really Going On Here and Towards Emotional Literary. Her public profile grew when it was revealed she had counselled Princess Diana, prior to Diana’s public discussion of her struggle with bulimia. Her 2016 BBC radio series In Therapy, in which Orbach and a series of actors re-enacted scenes from her therapeutic practice, was later turned into a book. Orbach was married to Joseph Schwartz for 30 years, with whom she has two children. She formed a relationship with writer Jeanette Winterson in the late 1990s, marrying in 2015 but separating in 2019. Orbach lives in London where she continues to run a clinical practice. Her current relationship status is unknown.