Leone Ross was born in Coventry, England, June 26, 1969. At age six her mother emigrated to Jamaica, the land of her birth. Leone was raised and educated in Jamaica, graduating with the highest grades in her faculty from the University of the West Indies in 1990. She returned to England to do her Master's Degree in International Journalism at the City University, and presently lives in London.
She has always called herself Jamaican. "I cannot imagine who or what I would be without that grounding, that sense of home." Leone began working as a journalist when she was 15 years old, doing freelance review work for various NGO's in Jamaica and for the Inter Press News Agency. Her first staff job was for The Voice newspaper in London, where she was eventually promoted to desk editor. She went on to work for a variety of publications, including Company, Mizz, the Sunday Times and feminist magazine Sibyl in the UK, and MS magazine in the USA.
She published her first novel in 1996 with a small independent publisher, and began to write fiction for a variety of anthologies published in the USA, the UK, Eastern Europe and Canada. Her second novel was published in the UK in 1999 and editions have been produced in the USA and France. Her work is generally concerned with gender, race, sexuality, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of childhood. In 2000, Leone was was a recipient of a London Arts Board Writers Award. Today she teaches creative writing at the City Literary Institute in London and will be a Fellow at Trinity College in Dublin in 2001.
