By Callum Ludwig
For Seville resident Bill Richardson, great tragedy has also brought great inspiration.
In the span of the last four to five years, 90-year-old Mr Richardson has lost his brother and sister before cancer took the lives of his wife and daughter too.
Mr Richardson said following the loss of his family and the onset of Covid, he was in a really bad way mentally.
“I was listening to The Project one night and they were talking about a 15-year-old girl who was being given a hard time on her phone, and I felt like I just knew what she felt like and I decided to write a poem called Reaching Out and then I wrote another one and another one,” he said.
“I suppose I gave a copy to a few people and I ended up talking to someone who turned out to be a publisher, he really liked my poems and wanted to know more about them and he was able to get it published on 24 February 2022, which coincidentally was my daughter’s birthday. I was gobsmacked.”
The man Mr Richardson spoke to was Ian Bosler, a best-selling author and Publishing and Printing Advisor at Intertype Publishing and Printing, who was able to Mr Williamson’s collection of poems on Amazon, entitled ‘Dreams Have A Meaning: Of Love And Devotion’.
Mr Richardson said all he ever intended to do was write about life.
“It went over well and people loved it, I’m no Edgar Allen Poe or anything like that, but it has gone well, it just amazes me that it has taken off the way it has,” he said.
“With everything that has happened, I get a lot of anxiety and panic attacks, sometimes I get flustered and struggle to put my sentences together but this has been amazing.”
Mr Richardson’s poor run of luck hasn’t just extended to his family, as he also overcame cancer himself and only last year had an accident that took out his right eye.
Despite all his hardship, Mr Richardson is generously putting all the proceeds of any sales of the book towards The Cancer Foundation in memory of his family’s battles.
‘Dreams Have A Meaning: Of Love And Devotion’ can be bought on Kindle or as a paperback here: www.amzn.asia/d/c49Ix13
