Tom Leonard (poet)

He previously voiced support for an "independent Scottish Socialist Republic", but was opposed to the 2014 independence referendum, criticising the SNP and the referendum process on his journal.

Leonard voiced his support for the cultural boycott of Israel in response to its policies towards Palestine. He co-signed a letter to the Glasgow Herald with writers including Liz Lochhead, AL Kennedy and Iain Banks, criticising the inclusion of Israeli dance troupe Batsheva in the 2012 Edinburgh International Festival.

In 2009, Leonard released Outside the Narrative, a collection of his poetry from 1965 to 2009.

Access to the Silence (2004) compiles his poetic and poster works from 1984 to 2003, exploring the experimental and the surreal to a greater degree without losing any of his truthfulness or openness.

With Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, he became Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow in 2001, retiring in 2009. He died in December 2018, aged 74.

His most overtly political work followed in 1995, as Leonard published another collection, entitled Reports From The Present. It compiles Leonard's corpus of work from 1982 to 1994, with the collection incorporating political satires, collages, essays, "antidotes, anecdotes and accusations" ranging from explorations of the differences between poetry and prose to scathing attacks on the forces of power that corrupt culture for financial or political gain.

In 1993, he released Places of the Mind, a biographical novel based on the seminal Scottish author James Thomson. Best known for his epic poem The City of Dreadful Night, Thomson’s life and works are captured by Leonard in a study of poetry, alcoholism and freethinking.

Alongside his literary output, Leonard was vocal on a number of political issues. In 1991, he published On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, Commonly Known as The Gulf War with Leonard's Shorter Catechism, in which he was highly critical of British and American involvement in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War.

Whilst working as Writer in Residence at Renfrew District Libraries in 1990, Leonard compiled Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War, an anthology of poetry which sought to resurrect the work of long forgotten poets from the West of Scotland and disprove the belief that Scotland at that time was a cultural wasteland,, a belief perpetuated by claims such as those of T. S. Eliot, who once claimed that Scotland has no literary culture. Radical Renfrew wished to dispel this idea, and Leonard in his introduction suggests that in denying the existence of a native Scottish culture, the Scottish people have been denied "the right to equality of dialogue with those in possession of Queen's English or 'good' Scots."

In 1984, he released Intimate Voices, a selection of his work from 1965 onwards including poems and essays on William Carlos Williams and "the nature of hierarchical diction in Britain." It shared the award for Scottish Book of the Year, and was banned from Central Region school libraries. Peter Manson, in the Poetry Review, claimed the poems, "speak so precisely and with such a fierce, analytical wit that they transcend their status as poems and become part of the shared apparatus we use to think with. I don't know any other contemporary poetry of which that is so true."

He published Definite Articles: Selected Prose 1973–2012 in May 2013, a compilation gathering forty years of essays, articles, reviews and journal entries.

Published in 1969, his Six Glasgow Poems has been called 'epoch-making'. The poems were first published as an insert in Glasgow University Magazine.

He commenced study on a degree at the University of Glasgow in 1967, but left after two years. While there, he encountered poets including Tom McGrath, Alan Spence, Aonghas MacNeacail and Philip Hobsbaum, and also acted as editor of the university magazine. He returned to the university during the 1970s in order to complete a degree in English and Scottish Literature.

Tom Leonard (22 August 1944 – 21 December 2018) was a Scottish poet, writer and critic. He was best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect, particularly his Six Glasgow Poems and The Six O'Clock News. His work frequently dealt with the relationship between language, class and culture.

Leonard was born in Glasgow in 1944. His father was a train-driver who had moved to Scotland from Dublin in 1916. His mother, also of Irish descent, came from Saltcoats and had previously worked at the Nobel dynamite factory in Ardeer. Tom was the youngest of four children - he had two brothers and one sister.