In 1985 the poet Tom Leonard, who has died aged 74, won the Saltire prize for Scottish Book of the Year with Intimate Voices, a selection of poems and other works, either in Glasgow dialect or in English, from the previous two decades.

Shortly afterwards it was banned from schools and libraries in the central region of Scotland, the chair of the education committee commenting: “There are some harmful words in it, and I’m not talking about bloody. Sometimes the naked truth has to be clothed.”

He had in mind, for instance, the sense of exclusion and defiance expressed in Good Style, one of Six Glasgow Poems (1969). It pointed to how the written version of the language he spoke was not considered a suitable medium for poetry:

helluva hard tay read theez init

stull

if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then

gawn

get tay fuck ootma road

ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz so ah um



ah no whit ahm dayn

tellnyi

jiss try enny a yir fly patir wi me

stick thi bootnyi good style

so ah wull



Some teachers and critics derided Tom’s poems for being in bad English, others for being in bad Scots. The Six O’Clock News (from Unrelated Incidents, 1976) confronts the assumption that words would not ring true in a register of Glasgow speech, whereas they do in Received Pronunciation: “this is thi / six a clock / news thi / man said n / thi reason / a talk wia / BBC accent / iz coz yi / widny wahnt / mi ti talk / aboot thi / trooth wia / voice lik / wanna yoo / scruff.”

From 2000 it was a GCSE set work in England and Wales, but Tom resisted giving permission for the Scottish exam board to use it because they wanted to frame it as part of a debate about Scots language, thereby removing it from its wider political context. In poems, essays, sound-pieces, cartoons and anthologies, Tom exposed how politics functioned in language and language in politics.

Born in Glasgow, during an electricity blackout, Tom was the son of Thomas Leonard, a train driver from Dublin, and his wife, Mary (nee Mulgrew), who was Scottish-Irish. The family moved soon after his birth to a new council estate in the Pollok area of Glasgow.

From an early age he read constantly, and most Saturdays from soon after 8am he could be found waiting for Pollok library to open. When he had exhausted the books of interest there he took the bus to other libraries. By the age of 16 Tom had read all the Dickens he could find. While his sister and older brothers listened to rock and pop on Radio Luxembourg, he argued for time on the family wireless to hear classical music on the Third Programme.

The door to other Englishes was thrown open for him when he came upon an early nudge towards Glasgow dialect, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd Haw, an Inseks, an, Aw, a Fush (1961). At the same time Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, 1945-60 introduced him to Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn and others whose work cut loose from Standard English.

From Lourdes secondary school, in 1967 he went to Glasgow University, leaving after a couple of years. There he and writers including Tom McGrath, Alan Spence and Aonghas MacNeacail, as well as the musician Allan Tall, formed a loose grouping called the Other People.

When Tom became editor of GUM, the Glasgow University magazine, the printer refused to print his writing “because of the gutter language”. Xeroxing the poems on a student union photocopying machine, he inserted them individually into every single copy. This was the first appearance of Six Glasgow Poems.

The poet Philip Hobsbaum taught at the university, and on Sunday nights invited writers to his flat. There Tom met Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Liz Lochhead.

In 1971 Tom married Sonya O’Brien, a teacher who later became a jeweller, and whose family had a printing business in Dublin. Her father said he would produce a book of Tom’s work, a promise that resulted in Poems (1973). Tom graduated in English and Scottish literature and began the research that in 1993 resulted in Places of the Mind, a biography of James Thomson, author of the long poem The City of Dreadful Night.

While writer in residence for Renfrew district libraries, Tom compiled Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War (1990), bringing back into print more than 60 poets from the west of Scotland.

He held writer posts at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, and at Bell College of Technology (now part of the University of West Scotland). From 2001 to 2009 he was professor of creative writing at Glasgow.

From 1984 I edited the Edinburgh Review and published his work quite regularly for six years. He offered me the 17 poems of what was published in book form in 1990 as Nora’s Place, exploring the consciousness of a woman as she goes about her life thinking, despairing, food shopping, daydreaming, self-engulfing and being. As she moves between first person and third person and no person, time tumbles around her and sometimes stops.

Tom could be expansive: his performance pieces included Lentil Soup, Diagnostic, during which he cooked on stage, with each member of the audience receiving a medicine bottle of the result to take home.

He could also be concise. In 2002 he wrote a poem for an anthology celebrating the NHS:

the state hospital

with one bed

always full

always efficient



He is survived by Sonya, his sons Michael and Stephen, and his grandsons, Alex and Joe.

• Tom Leonard, poet, born 22 August 1944; died 21 December 2018

• This article was amended on 6 February 2019 to correct an editing error in the names of Tom Leonard’s grandsons.