Tom Leonard (poet)
| Tom Leonard | |
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| Born | 1944 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Alma mater | University of Glasgow |
| Genre | Scottish literature, poetry |
| Notable works | Six Glasgow Poems, The Six O'Clock News |
| Website | |
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Tom Leonard (born 1944) is a Scottish poet, writer and critic. He is best known for his poems written in the Glaswegian dialect of Scots, particularly his Six Glasgow Poems and The Six O'Clock News. His work frequently deals 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.
He began a degree at the University of Glasgow in 1967, but left after two years. While there he met poets including Tom McGrath, Alan Spence, Aonghas MacNeacail and Philip Hobsbaum, and also edited the university magazine. He returned to complete a degree in English and Scottish Literature in the 1970s.
He joined a group of new and distinctive authors, including Philip Hobsbaum, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, James Kelman, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington, of whom Hobsbaum was the nucleus. He has been part of the Scottish literary scene for the past forty years.
With Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow in 2001. He retired from the position in 2009.
Published in 1969, his Six Glasgow Poems has been called 'epoch-making'. The poems were first published as an insert in Glasgow University Magazine.
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.”
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