The Two RichardsPaperback, 5 November 2021

Vladimir Azarov was a child of the Soviet Kazakhstan steppes. When his mother discovered that he had a slight curvature of the spine, with her own loving humour she nicknamed him Richie, after Richard III, the 14th century English king, himself crooked, made famous as a monster by Shakespeare. At the same time Azarov suffered a vision-altering wound to his eye that transformed the way he perceived the world, both real and imagined. The wound eventually healed and, as he grew up feeling a wry kinship to the king, his bent eye became that of a visionary, of an artist who was a convention-breaking architect, and finally as a poet, not writing in Russian, but in the King's English. When, not long ago, the actual bones of Richard III were found under a parking lot in Leicester town, Azarov - now in his 80s living in Toronto, and remembering his kinship by name - envisioned the archeological dig and re-interment of the bones, and he became one in his mind with the reputation-renovated and redeemed king. He became, at last, Richie-Richard III, being sung to on a rainy day, over a new grave, by medieval knights.