The radical poet, playwright, and actor Heathcote Williams has died at the age of 75. He wrote a number of book-length polemical poems over several decades, including works about the devastation being wrought on the natural environment.

His three acclaimed poems written at the end of the 1980s - Whale Nation, Sacred Elephant, and Autogeddon – were all filmed by the BBC. More recently he delivered a poetic broadside, Boris Johnson – the Blond Beast of Brexit: A Study in Depravity. In January this year he published American Porn on Donald Trump's inauguration day.

There were comparisons with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the subject of one of Williams’s later long poems, ‘Shelley in Oxford’, published in 2012. Both were rebels who wrote with passionate social anger. Like Shelley, Eton-educated Williams did not complete his Oxford degree. 

His obituary in the Guardian records that Williams was a member of the Magic Circle, learned fire-eating (and accidentally set himself ablaze when demonstrating to his then-girlfriend, the model Jean Shrimpton), discovered a new species of honey-producing wasp in the Amazon, helped establish the independent state of Frestonia in Notting Hill while running a venture for squatters, and was a founding editor with Germaine Greer, among others, of the sexual liberation newspaper, Suck.

He died on Saturday in Oxford after an extended period of ill health.