Tom Leonard

' Tom Leonard''' (born 1944 in Glasgow) is a Scottish poet,best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect.

Life
Tom Leonard has been part of the Scottish literary co-operation for the past forty years. With Alasdair Guy and Jamie Celman, he has been appointed Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University.

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 resurrecting the work of long forgotten poets from the West of Scotland and disproving the “traditional”, fictitious belief that Scotland at that time was a cultural wasteland. T. S. Eliot once claimed, to the effect, that Scotland has no literary culture. Radical Renfrew shows that this is incorrect and also 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.”

Writing
Published in 1976, his Glasgow Poems kick-started a literary counterculture.

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 yet 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.”

His poem "The Six O'Clock News" from Unrelated Incidents is compulsory study for an AQA English Language GCSE qualification in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

In 1993 he released Places of the Mind, the only 20th century biographical novel of the Scottish writer 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.

His most overtly political work followed in 1995. Reports From The Present compiles work from 1982 to 1994 including 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.

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