Notorious for his drug-fuelled literary experiments and the fact that he shot his partner, beat writer Burroughs also made art inspired by the climate crisis

One day 51 years ago, out in the wilds of New Mexico, Kathelin Gray asked a question of her hero, the writer and artist William S Burroughs, whom she had just met. “William, I have read your books and I must know: what is your attitude to women?”

The question had been eating away at Gray for the best part of a decade. As a teenage babysitter, she read Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch and was blown away by it. “The very yuckiness of the imagery, the critique of predatory capitalism, the degrading sex and violence – all that spoke to me,” she says.