Brendan McLeod

One of the country's most accomplished competitive performance poets, Brendan McLeod is a former Canadian SLAM poetry champion, Vancouver SLAM champion, and was the runner up at the 2005 World SLAM poetry championship. In the past three years, he has performed at over 300 poetry readings in 10 countries. His first novel, ‘The Convictions of Leonard McKinley’, was nominated for the 2008 Re:Lit Award, Canada's top prize for independent fiction. That same year his music group, The Fugitives, was up for a Canadian Folk Music Award.
His newest spoken word album, “Little Troubles” was released in August 2009. Brendan has been given the honour of becoming one of the 2009/2010 Vancouver East Cultural Centre’s Curator-in-Residence.
He has toured extensively all over the world, and has been a featured performer at over forty European events, including the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, the Writing on the Wall Festival in Liverpool, the Runnymede International Literature Festival. He has been a featured reader at many prestigious European reading series, including Big Word in Edinburgh, Brixtongue in London, Hammer and Tongue in Oxford, Mouthtrap Cabaret in Reading, Speak & Spin in Munich, and Wicked Words in Leeds. He has also performed at the University of Bangor, Wales, and as a guest facilitator for a workshop on the Harlem Renaissance at the University of Bamburg, Germany.
He has a BA (Honors with Distinction) in Philosophy from the University of Victoria, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Waterloo. Excerpts from his first novel were published in the academic journal Sophia.