Leo is also a novelist, and his critically acclaimed novel Eddie the Kid was published by Zero Books. 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.’ Leo published his third novel The World Turned Upside Down with the Nigerian publisher Books Farm House & Publishers in 2021.  His short stories have also appeared in different collections (for example see here and here).

As the founder of roape.net, Leo spent more than ten years as commissioning editor, interviewing and editing contributions to the website from radical researchers, scholar-activists, and activists on socialist activism and transformation on the continent.