Cristín Leach

Cristín Leach is an Irish writer, broadcaster, and author of the critically acclaimed memoir Negative Space. Art critic for The Sunday Times Ireland for 20 years, her writing has been published in Winter Papers, The Mersey Review, Irish Arts Review, Irish Writers Handbook, magazines, newspapers, artist books and gallery publications, and broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 as part of Sunday Miscellany and Keywords. Read by the author, Negative Space was an RTÉ Radio 1 Book on One in 2024 and a non-fiction bestseller in 2022. Her innovative collection of historical fiction, lyric essays and poetry, From Ten Till Dusk, A Portrait of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Twelve Stories, was published to mark 200 years of the RHA in Dublin.

Often rooted in memory and archive, her work explores tensions between public and private voice; themes including anxiety, sexuality, divorce and infidelity; relationships between words, bodies and art; and the role of place, societal expectations, political landscapes and family history in forming identity.

In 2023, her handmade mobile cube poem, “To the Line”, a haptic response to the paintings of Deirdre Frost, was purchased by the OPW for the Irish State Art Collection and has toured galleries in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Her alternative hymn, “Harvesting History”, written for artist Debbie Godsell’s Flail, premiered with a performance at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in 2025. Her collaborative work includes the poem “Here” with writer Oonagh Montague published in Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine (Arlen House, 2024); and a short story and craft essay with Scottish writer Lindz McLeod for An Honour and a Privilege (Stanchion, 2025).