Cristín Leach

Cristín Leach is an Irish writer, broadcaster and art critic. Her 2022 divorce memoir Negative Space was a critically-acclaimed Irish non-fiction bestseller.

Her award-winning short stories have been published in Winter Papers (2017) and The Four Faced Liar (2025) and her collaborative works have featured in anthologies including An Honour and a Privilege (Stanchion, 2025) and Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine (Arlen House, 2024). Her nonfiction has appeared in Winter Papers, The Mersey Review, Irish Arts Review, RTÉ Culture, monographs and artist books, and been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 as part of Sunday Miscellanyand Keywords. She is the author of From Ten Till Dusk, a collection of historical fiction, hybrid texts and lyric essays marking 200 years of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in Dublin. Her haptic cube poem, To The Line, was purchased by the OPW for the Irish State Art Collection in 2023 and toured galleries in Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2024/25. Her spoken-word/sound-work has been exhibited at festivals in Ireland, Scotland, Denmark and Peru. She is the recipient of a 2025 Arts Council Agility Award for Literature and recent writing residencies at The Dock Arts in Leitrim and Brendan House, Birr, County Offaly. For The Sunday Times, she wrote and published more than half a million words about Irish art between 2003 and 2023.

Her work examines relationships between archive and narrative identity, tensions between public and private voice, themes of anxiety, sexuality and fidelity, and connections between sensations, words and art. During her CCI residency, she will work on her debut novel.