Richard Livermore (1944-2020)

As if this year wasn’t bad enough already, but grim news this morning from Edinburgh about my friend, the poet Richard Livermore. He died last night in St. Columba’s Hospice after a long bout with peritoneal cancer. He dealt with his terminal illness in a dignified, candid and often darkly witty way. I’m not going to go into a full-on eulogy here, I merely want to share with you what I think is one of the best pictures of Richard, taken in (I think the late 1970s or early 1980s) by the legendary photographer Sunil Gupta. Richard is on the right and his then partner Bernie is on the left. A few months before Richard died he entrusted to me his paper archive which also included photos. This picture is slightler longer than A4 and as such would not fit in the envelope so Richard just folded it in half!!!

Image by Sunil Gupta