Niall Leonard

Niall Leonard was born in 1959 in grew up in Newry, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the UK National Film and TV School in 1986 as a director and screenwriter, and went on to write comedies, thrillers and historical dramas for UK network TV, including Ballykissangel, Hornblower, Monarch of the Glen and Wire In The Blood.

His first novel, Crusher, was published in 2012 by Random House, and nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America and for Best First Novel by the 2013 Edinburgh Book Festival. Incinerator, the sequel to Crusher, was published in the UK in January 2014 and the third part of the trilogy, Shredder, was published in June 2014.

Over the same period Niall also wrote the screenplays for the Universal movies Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, adapted from the global bestsellers penned by his wife E L James. In July 2021 Pantheon Books in the USA published M, King’s Bodyguard, Niall’s historical thriller based on actual characters and events from 1901.

During the Great Lockdown of 2020 Niall completed a project that had been obesssing him for years – a retelling of Dante’s Inferno as a contemporary political thriller. A Heart Within the Beast is now available on Amazon as an ebook. Niall is currently working on a sequel to one of these novels… you’ll have to wait and see which!