Leo Zeilig
Non-fiction writer, Novelist
About
Leo Zeilig is a celebrated writer and historian. His nonfiction examines the remarkable lives, scholarship and political movements of the Global South. He has written on Patrice Lumumba, Frantz Fanon, Thomas Sankara and Ruth First, as well as the failed socialist experiments in Africa after independence. In A Revolutionary for Our Time (Haymarket, 2022), he tells the story of the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney.
He is also a prize-winning novelist. His much-admired novel Eddie the Kid (Zero, 2013) follows a young activist who wants to change the world and stop the war in Iraq; instead his life unravels after he is arrested on a protest in 2002. His second novel An Ounce of Practice (Hoperoad, 2017), is set in London and Harare and looks at two groups of activists, and two struggles bound tightly together. All of Leo Zeilig’s fiction explores how generations of leftwing activists have been shaped by their involvement in politics.
Zeilig’s fiction and nonfiction books have been highly praised in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Morning Star and theIndependent. He writes in a range of newspapers, reviews, edited collections, and online platforms.
As an editor, Leo Zeilig has worked for many years on the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), a radical quarterly founded by anti-apartheid activists in 1974. In his editing work he promotes and develops new voices across Africa, Europe and North America. Leo lives with his partner in London and Folkestone.