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. Biography 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. 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. 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. 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. Work Poetry 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." His arguably best-known poem, "The Six O'Clock News" from Unrelated Incidents, at one stage was compulsory study for an AQA English Language GCSE qualification in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Access to the Silence (2004) compiles his poetic and poster works from 1984 to 2003, exploring the experimental and the surreal