American writer Andrew Sean Greer was BOTD in 1970. Born in Washington, D.C. to a middle-class family, he grew up in Rockville, Maryland. He studied at Brown University, where he was mentored by writer Edmund White, and latterly at the University of Montana, and began publishing short stories in Esquire, The Paris Review and The New Yorker magazines. He rose to public attention with his 2004 novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was selected for the Today Show Book Club, becoming a national bestseller. He achieved similar success with his 2008 novel The Story of a Marriage, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award. He is best known for his 2017 novel Less, a comic portrait of a middle-aged gay writer contemplating career failure and romantic disappointment. The surprise winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it vaulted Greer to international celebrity, followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship. He published a follow-up novel, Less is Lost, in 2022. Openly gay since forever, Greer married his long-term boyfriend David Ross in 2009, separating in 2020. He is in a relationship with Italian writer Enrico Rotelli, with whom he lives in San Francisco and Milan, exhaustively documented on his Instagram account. His next novel Villa Coco, based on his life in Italy, will be released in 2026.