American writer Donna Tartt was BOTD in 1963. Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, she showed an early interest in writing, composing poetry and short stories in her teens. She studied at the University of Mississippi, where she was fast-tracked into a graduate literature course. In 1982, she transferred to Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied philosophy and befriended fellow student Bret Easton Ellis. She became an overnight literary star with the publication of her 1992 debut novel The Secret History, a psychological drama about a group of Classics students at a Vermont university who conspire to murder their friend. Drawing on the Gothic atmosphere of Bennington and heavily indebted to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the book became an international bestseller, triggering a publishing trend for “dark academia” fiction. Tartt took a decade to produce her next novel, The Little Friend, a Southern Gothic tale about a precocious 12 year-old girl hunting for the murderer of her brother. Her third novel, The Goldfinch, a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations set in contemporary New York City, was published in 2014 to a storm of publicity. An international bestseller, it won Tartt the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A film version of The Goldfinch was released in 2019, but was a critical and commercial failure. Tartt was not given an option to be involved the filmmaking, reportedly firing her long-term agent over the deal. The Secret History remains unfilmed, despite several rumours about planned film and TV adaptations. A reluctant celebrity, Tartt seldom gives interviews or discusses her work, and little is known about her personal life. Her lesbian chic wardrobe of tailored men’s suits and shirts, with hair cut short into an androgynous bob, has led to extensive speculation about her sexuality, as has her disinterest in writing about marriage or sexual politics and the persistent currents of homoerotic attraction between her juvenile male characters. She lives in New York City and on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is believed to be in a relationship with gallery owner Neal Guma (to whom she dedicated The Little Friend). In 2023, she confirmed that she was working on her next novel.