Cristín Leach

Cristín Leach is an Irish art critic, broadcaster, and author of the critically acclaimed memoir Negative Space. A critic for The Sunday Times for twenty years, her experimental art writing collection From Ten Till Dusk was published to mark the bicentenary of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2023. Her journalism, essays, short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Winter Papers, Irish Arts Review, RTÉ Culture, competition anthologies, artist books and monographs, and broadcast as part of Sunday Miscellany and Keywords on RTÉ Radio 1. For RTÉ Lyric FM, she presented Ireland Portrayed and co-presented the New York Festivals award-winning series Through the Canvas. Her writing explores the relationships between public and private voice; sexuality, divorce and infidelity; words, bodies and art; and the role of place and family history in forming identity. Her mobile cube poem, To the Line, a haptic text response to the paintings of Deirdre Frost, is part of the OPW Art Collection. Negative Space was a 2022 non-fiction bestseller and a 2024 RTÉ Radio 1 Book on One. She is one of twelve writers collaborating with Scottish author Lindz McLeod on the short story craft book An Honour and a Privilege (Stanchion, 2025).