Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow in 1944. He was educated at Lourdes Secondary School and at the University of Glasgow. Leonard was a member of Philip Hobsbaum’s Glasgow writers’ group which included, among others, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman.

Six Glasgow Poems was published in 1969. Since then Leonard has been active as a poet, scholar and polemicist. He has been writer in residence at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, at Bell College of Technology and at Renfrew District Libraries. Most recently, Leonard was appointed Professor of Creative writing, along with Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, at Glasgow University.

Leonard’s work has attracted praise and controversy in roughly equal measure. His collection Intimate Voices: Selected Work 1965-1983 (1984) was banned from Central Region school libraries in the same year that it shared the Scottish Book of the Year Award.

As well as his poetry, which is often experimental in form and makes frequent use of Glaswegian vernacular speech, Leonard publishes essays, which appear alongside the poems in his volumes of collected work.

Whilst working as Writer in Residence at Renfrew District Libraries, Leonard edited Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War (1990), an anthology containing the work of local poets. He has also written a biography of James Thomson entitled Places of the Mind (1993).

Since much of Leonard’s poetry insists upon the politics of ‘langwij’, it is not surprising that he has published work in response to current political events. This work , much of it reprinted in Reports from the Present: Selected Work 1982-1994 (1995) includes Two Members’ Monologues & A Handy form for Use in Connection with the City of Culture (1990) and On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, commonly known as The Gulf War, with Leonard’s Shorter Catechism (1993). Another collection, Access to the Silence: Poetry 1984-2003 was published in 2004.