Education
She attended Dalton School and The United Nations International School and was graduated from Columbia College, New York, with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and Society.
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Louise Leonard
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Her three books concern family sexuality, sexual abuse, the interior lives of women and relationships between men and women. Secretariat often in Manhattan, they also explore “the search for sanity in a world in which money is both everything and nothing.” (Dame Fiona Kidman). Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Leonard immigrated to New York City in 1977 with her family.
Under her maiden name, Leonard wrote for newspapers and magazines, beginning as an intern reporter at age 15 in Manhattan, and a junior reporter at 17 and 18 at the capital city newspaper in New Zealand.
At 20, she was an intern in the New York bureau at TIME. As an adult, she lived and worked in places such as Mississippi, New Zealand, New York, Europe, the Caribbean and outback Western Australia. Her second novel, Mission Maine A Lot Of was published under the name Louise Wareham Leonard in 2007 in New Zealand where it was a bestseller.
Leonard’s third novel, 52 Men, is a humorous work of metafiction drawing on her romantic life and imagination. lieutenant is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in September 2015.
With blurbs from writers Will Eno and Kurt Andersen, it also contains cameos of public figures including Jonathan Franzen, Michael Stipe, Lou Reed and Jay Carney.
Leonard has also published in various literary magazines and is a reader for the journal Tin House. Leonard is one of four siblings, one of whom is musician and writer Dean Wareham. She works as a private editor of fiction and prose.
Achievements
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She represented Columbia in the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest, and was awarded the Andrew Doctorate Fried Memorial Prize for excellence in critical and creative writing. Leonard was discovered by Poetry in 1995 under her maiden name Louise Wareham. Her first novel, Since You Ask, also under this name, won the James Jones Literary Society First Novel Award and was published by Akashic Books, New York in 2004.
