Linda Leatherbarrow

Linda Leatherbarrow is a prize-winning Scottish writer and illustrator. She is best known for her short story collection, Essential Kit, and her illustrations for John Hegley's comic poems in Visions of the Bone Idol. Her short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in the British Council's New Writing 8, the London Magazine, Ambit and many other anthologies and literary journals. She is a regular contributor to the literary review, Slightly Foxed, and has interviewed many writers, including Rose Tremain, Kate Mosse, and Susan Hill, for Newbooks magazine. In 2005 she was given an Arts Council Award.

Biography
Linda Leatherbarrow was born in Dumfries, Scotland, and brought up in England and Scotland. In the 1970s, she studied art at Hornsey College of Art and Walthamstow Art School. In the 1980s, she collaborated with the comedian and poet John Hegley and published two books of his poems with her illustrations. She also took a postgraduate diploma in Communication Studies at Goldsmiths College, London, and began to write short prose fiction. Her stories were widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She is three times winner of the London Writer's Competition. In 1995, while working for Haringey Library Service and in collaboration with Haringey Arts Council, she set up the Haringey Literature Festival and co-ordinated it for three years. In 1998 she was made Reader in Residence for the London Borough of Enfield and arranged a series of high-profile literature promotions across the borough. In 2000 she was invited to teach on the Creative Writing MA at Middlesex University where she was a Senior Lecturer. She also taught at the City University and the City Literary Institute in London. In 2003, her short story Ride was selected for publication in Tapestry, a Norwegian anthology of British writing for students of English language and literature. Ride is included in the collection Essential Kit.

Describing Essential Kit, the writer Shena Mackay wrote:

'A wide-ranging rich and surprising gallery of characters includes a nineteen-year-old leaving home, a talking gorilla in the swinging sixties, a shoe fetishist and a long distance walker. The prose is lyrical, witty and uplifting, moving and always pertinent. . . a seriously fresh original talent.'

She has a son, two daughters and a granddaughter, and is married to the writer Laurence Scott.