Leo Zeilig is a writer and researcher. He has written extensively on African politics and history, including books on working-class struggle and the development of revolutionary movements and biographies on some of Africa’s most important political thinkers and activists. Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy—the radical African-studies journal founded by activists and scholars in 1974—a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. Leo’s critically acclaimed novel Eddie the Kid was published by Zero Books in 2013. It was praised in The Guardian: ‘This passionate, sad and well-told book offers a compelling portrait of a flawed young radical.’ Eddie the Kid won the 2014 Creative Work prize at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. In 2017 Leo’s second novel, An Ounce of Practice, was published by Hoperoad. Praised in The Conversation as ‘a brilliant work of literary imagination that takes the reader to new realities in an engaging, moving read, hilariously humorous at times.’ Leo is writing his third novel.
Leo is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. He has written in a number of academic domains, including sociology, political science, political economy, geography and history. Here are a few of the academic articles, chapters and reports he has written in recent years.
Books
Edited collections and reports
Articles and chapters
Africa is a Country posted an article based on some research on Walter Rodney that I have been doing. “Rediscovered lectures Walter Rodney gave in 1978 in Hamburg shows a reflective intellectual, thinking critically about postcolonial African governance. Between April and June of 1978, Walter Rodney, then already an important intellectual for his book, How Europe […]
For the Review of African Political Economy, Colin Stoneman praises An Ounce of Practice, which he commends as a story of ‘British socialists wishing to fight the impact of neo-colonialism and neoliberal economics on Africa.’ The review can be read in full here. Why does anyone write a novel? Why does a political person write a novel? Why does […]
Lynnda Wardle reviews An Ounce of Practice in the Glasgow Review of Books An Ounce of Practice by Leo Zeilig is a hugely enjoyable, ambitious bildungsroman following the life and loves of left-wing academic Viktor Isaacs, and his relationships with a group of activists in London and Zimbabwe. The book is framed by the economic insecurities of the 2008 […]
My article on Frantz Fanon in Critical and Radical Social Work has been made free to access for six months. The article Frantz Fanon’s radical psychiatry: the making of a revolutionary is available here. Please feel free to share the link and read the article. ‘Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and revolutionary. Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, he studied in France and […]