Adrian Henri (10 April 1932 – 20 December 2000) was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group the Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's Merseybeat zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. He was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry since 1945 as the "theoretician" of the three. His characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth. He was influenced by the French Symbolist school of poetry and surrealist art. Life and career Adrian Henri's grandfather was a seaman from Mauritius who settled in Birkenhead, Cheshire, where Henri was born. In 1938, at the age of six, he moved to Rhyl. He studied art at Newcastle and for a short time taught art at Preston Catholic College before going on to lecture in art at both Manchester and Liverpool Colleges of Art. He was closely associated with other artists of the area and the era including the Pop artist Neville Weston and the conceptual artist Keith Arnatt. In 1972 he won a major prize for his painting Meat Painting II – In Memoriam Rene Magritte in the John Moores competition. He was president of the Merseyside Arts Association and Liverpool Academy of the Arts in the 1970s and was an honorary professor of the city's John Moores University. Henri had a 10-year relationship with Carol Ann Duffy, who later became Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. The pair met when she was 16, him 39 at the time, and lived together until 1982. Henri married once, to Joyce; the couple later separated. He had no children. For the last 15 years of his life his partner was Catherine Marcangeli. His career spanned everything from artist and poet to teacher, rock-and-roll performer, playwright and librettist. He could name among his friends John Lennon, George Melly, Allen Ginsberg, Willy Russell, John Willett and Paul McCartney. Unlike McGough and Patten, Henri turned his back on the trendier London scene, and chose to remain in Liverpool, saying there was nowhere he loved better. His numerous publications include The Mersey Sound (Penguin, 1967), with McGough and Patten, a best-selling poetry anthology that brought all three of them to wider attention, Collected Poems, 1967–85