Tom Leonard was born in Glasgow on 22 August 1944. He became one of the Scottish writers most closely associated with putting the sound of Glasgow speech directly onto the printed page.

His father was a train driver from Dublin, and his mother was of Irish descent and came from Saltcoats. Leonard grew up in Glasgow and read extensively before entering Glasgow University at 23. He left after two years, later returning to complete his degree.

His Six Glasgow Poems appeared in 1969. Leonard used phonetic spelling to reproduce the sounds and rhythms of speech around him. This choice also let him question assumptions about which forms of English were considered suitable for literature and which speakers were treated as authoritative.

That concern is particularly clear in The Six O’Clock News, part of his Unrelated Incidents sequence. The poem uses a Glasgow voice to challenge the idea that news sounds more truthful when delivered in the Received Pronunciation traditionally associated with the BBC.

The same work later entered formal education. The Six O’Clock News became a GCSE set text, placing Leonard’s treatment of Glasgow speech inside an educational system whose attitudes towards language his writing had challenged.

Leonard continued to write poetry, plays and prose. His collection Intimate Voices won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year award in 1985. He also spent years researching Places of the Mind, his biography of the nineteenth-century poet James Thomson.

In 2001, Leonard was appointed professor of creative writing at the University of Glasgow alongside Alasdair Grey and James Kelman. He remained there until retiring in 2009.