Rosemary McLeish

Rosemary McLeish was born in Glasgow in 1945 and moved to England when she was four. She returned to Glasgow in 1985 and lived there until 2010, when she and her husband retired to Kent. In 2005 she completed an M.Phil in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. She has had poems published in various magazines and in four Grey Hen anthologies, as well as publishing four pamphlets herself, the most recent being How Do You Think the Ladies Ride in 2008, and Zipped in 2012. Rosemary was a visual artist and her main interest was in finding ways of incorporating poems into artworks, and showing poems in exhibitions alongside artworks.

Rosemary McLeish died of cancer on 23rd August, 2020. After her death, her publisher, Wordsmithery, set up the Rosemary McLeish Poetry Prize, something which she had long wished to do. The first year of the prize was for poems on the theme of ‘Nature’, a central theme to McLeish’s poetry collection I am a Field.