
Writer, Activist and Researcher
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— and an Honorary Research Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. 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 has recently published, The World Turned Upside Down with the Nigerian publisher Books Farm House & Publishers.
Books

News
Review – New York Times
‘His Effectiveness Did Not Go Unnoticed’: On the Radical Politics of Walter Rodney An illustrated take on Leo Zeilig’s new biography of the 1960s-70s revolutionary [...]
Book Review: The World Turned Upside Down
Heike Becker, anthropologist and writer, reviews The World Turned Upside Down for the Nordic Journal of African Studies. Bianca Ndour, the protagonist of Leo Zeilig’s [...]
A political novel that gives new perspective on world
The Tanzanian writer, activist and poet, Issa Shivji, reviews The World Turned Upside Down for the Kenyan newspaper The Nation. This is a political novel with [...]
In search of resistance
Writer and activist, Lee Wengraf, reviews The World Turned Upside Down for the Tempest Magazine. “We have already seen the first wave in 2011 in [...]
The class contradictions of scholar activism
On Africa is a County Ben Radley reviewed my latest novel The World Turned Upside Down. "The radical politics of the professional middle classes—too often [...]
Walter Rodney’s Lost Book: One Hundred Years of Development in Africa
On Liberated Texts I wrote about Walter Rodney's lost book, which was originally published in a limited edition in 1984. "One of the most astonishing [...]