Born in Ohio in 1940, Edmund White was a cultural critic and prolific author across many genres, whose best-known work was the autofiction trilogy that started with A Boy's Own Story (1982)

The author of more than 30 books, White focused primarily on gay themes, partly because as a teenager he looked ‘desperately’ and failed to find ‘things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn’t the only one’.  Of his writing, the New York Times called him the ‘paterfamilias of queer literature’. White himself said: ‘I was really inventing a genre, and it was a way of administering a therapy to myself.’ 

The co-founder of a gay men’s health charity, he was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1985 and his openness about his status was a significant factor in de-stigmatising the disease.

Edmund White was a Booker Prize judge in 1989. He died on 3 June 2025, aged 85.