My friend Tom Ridgway, who has died of cancer aged 51, was a freelance writer, editor and translator. He worked prolifically: on serious documents for the United Nations and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; and on less earnest fashion and culture magazines, including Colors, System and Tank – he once received a Louis Vuitton bag as payment.
He lived in many places, including Lichfield, Malvern, Treviso, New York and Berlin, but, for the past 20 years, he had made his home in Paris, eventually becoming a French citizen. There, over the last decade, he became a specialist in editing photographic essays, including for the publishers Delpire & Co, Atelier EXB and Self Publish, Be Happy.
Born in Sutton Coldfield, in the West Midlands, to Phillipa (nee Bayliss), a teacher, and Anthony Ridgway, a chartered agricultural surveyor, Tom went to school as a boarder at Malvern college. He studied English at Queen Mary London University, graduating in 1995, and started his writing life as a film reviewer for London Student. He gained a master’s in medieval literature from New York University in 1999, and another, in the history of Paris, from the University of London Institute in 2022.
He loved to travel, often to less-visited places, often in less-obvious seasons. Over 32 years of friendship that started out in university halls, he and I travelled and talked around Iran, Mexico, India, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. He loved long “marches moches” (hideous hikes) through the less picturesque edges of cities. He enjoyed living between different worlds but found grounding in the English language.
Tom was a great friend. He always wrote – mostly on old postcards, in perfect, tiny script. He organised people – to meet, to eat, to cycle. But he also liked time alone; particularly with his wife, Delphine de Lardemelle, whom he met at a picnic in Paris in 1999, and married in 2017, and their daughter, Aiko.
Even as Tom became ill, he was fiercely clear-eyed, independent, and able to laugh at the ironies and indignities of his situation. Travel became harder, but he fought to keep his horizons wide.
Delphine and Aiko survive Tom, as do his parents and his two brothers, Stephen and Matthew.
