Strong, Leonard Alfred George (1896–1958), writer, was born 8 March 1896 in Plymouth, Devon, England, first of two children of Leonard Ernest Strong, a manufacturer of artificial fertiliser, and his wife Marion, daughter of Alfred Mongan, a law clerk in Dublin. He spent summer holidays in Ireland but was educated at Plymouth's Hoe Preparatory School and Brighton College, from where he won an open classics scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford. Secretary of Wadham's literary society, he met Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats (qv) before he took a pass degree in classics and English in 1920. An assistant master (1917–30) at Summer Fields, Oxford, his first book was Dublin days (1921), a collection of lyrics that exhibits his early interest in dialect and epigrams. His first novel, Dewer rides (1929), was a commercial success and is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy, with a poetic opening that describes spring's cautious entry to Dartmoor. It represents a passing hope in a book that treats of incest, violence, and the demise of its unrepentant central character, Dick Brendon. Similar in style to the brutal realism of Liam O'Flaherty (qv), The garden (1931) combines sun-bathed childhood descriptions of Killiney with a shocking motorcycle accident that shatters the idyll. Sea wall (1933) is a Bildungsroman set around Sandycove, Co. Dublin. The director (1944) is a comic novel dedicated to Frank O'Connor (qv); its original subject is the arrival of a Hollywood production team in Ireland to film the fictional Mr Reilly's Awaken the west. ‘The English captain’, an attempt to reconcile the republican and unionist traditions in Ireland, is the highlight of Travellers (1945), which won the James Tait Black Prize. The sacred river (1949) is an insightful estimation of the importance of Shakespeare and music on James Joyce (qv). His novel Deliverance (1955) was followed by the collected poems, The body's imperfection (1957). These evidence a determinedly morbid humour, as in ‘Village graves’, a sequence of imaginary epitaphs. His last publication, Light above the lake (1958), was set in Co. Wicklow. A member of the Irish Academy of Letters and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he also served as treasurer of the Society of Authors. He died 17 August 1958 in Guildford, Surrey.
He married (29 July 1926) Dorothea Sylvia Tryce, daughter of the Eton assistant master Hubert Brinton; they had one son. A drawing by Wyndham Lewis and a caricature by Sir David Low survive in the possession of the family.