Leone Ross

Leone Ross FRSL is a novelist and short story writer, working in hybrid forms: literary fantasy; authentic erotica; the social commentary of magic realism. With an aesthetic deeply rooted in Jamaica where she grew up, Leone is obsessed with colour and bodies, in metaphorical language and the joyful challenge of fashioning good sentences. She has published three critically acclaimed novels (Faber & Faber) and a short story collection Come Let Us Sing Anyway (Peepal Tree Press). Her first novel, All the Blood is Red is written partially in the Jamaican patois voice of a sex worker, based on interviews by Leone’s journalist mother in the 1980s. Leone’s second novel Orange Laughter tells the story of a man going mad in the subway tunnels of New York. Her third, This One Sky Day, is a polyphonic magic realist novel satirising the Caribbean. Leone’s fiction has been nominated for the Women’s prize, the Goldsmiths prize, the Ondaatje prize, the OCM BOCAS prize, the Edge Hill short story prize, the V. S. Pritchett prize — and named a New York Times editor’s choice. In 2021, Leone won the Manchester prize for fiction.

Leone loves supporting other writers, and has worked with thousands — as a former newspaper editor, as a teacher of creative writing up to PhD level, and as the editor of ten anthologies, most recently Glimpse: A Black British Anthology of Speculative Fiction, published in 2022. Leone lives in London with her partner and their warring cats, but intends to retire near warm water.