author
Leonard Woolf
1880–1969
A sharp-minded writer and political thinker, he moved from colonial service in Ceylon to the heart of the Bloomsbury circle and helped shape one of the most famous literary partnerships of the 20th century. His life joined fiction, public debate, and publishing in a way that still feels unusually modern.
3 Audiobooks
Two Stories
by Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf
The Village in the Jungle
by Leonard Woolf
Stories of the East
by Leonard Woolf
About the author
Born in London in 1880, Leonard Woolf studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became part of the circle that would later be associated with Bloomsbury. He entered the British colonial civil service in Ceylon, and that experience later fed into his novel The Village in the Jungle, one of his best-known works.
After returning to England, he married Virginia Stephen in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, beginning with hand-printing books at home. The press became an important outlet not only for their own writing but also for major modern literature, and Leonard played a central role in its practical and editorial life.
Woolf was more than a publisher: he was also a political theorist, journalist, memoirist, and active public intellectual. Associated with the Fabian Society and Labour politics, he wrote widely on international government, empire, and peace, while also producing a long series of autobiographical works. He died in 1969, leaving behind a body of writing that shows both an alert political mind and a deeply observant record of literary life.