Leland Bardwell Biography

Irish novelist and poet, born in India, where her father was working on the Madras Southern and Midland Railways; she grew up in Leixlip, Co. Kildare and was educated in Co. Kildare. She taught in Scotland, then lived in Paris and London before settling in Co. Monaghan. Among Bardwell's collections of poems are The Mad Cyclist (1970), The Fly and the Bed Bug (1984), and Dostoevsky's Grave: Selected Poems (1991). Her novels include Girl on a Bicycle (1977), described by Anthony Burgess as ‘a period gem’, and There We Have Been (1989). The Attic Press in Dublin, which is strongly associated with women's writing, published a collection of her short stories, Different Kinds of Love (1987). She has also written for the theatre, television, and radio, for which she scripted a play based on the life of Edith Piaf. Bardwell's work has tended to concentrate upon the socio-political differences between Catholics and Protestants in Southern Ireland.