Leigh (David) Blackmore (born 1959) is an Australian horror writer, critic, editor, occultist, musician and proponent of post-left anarchy. He was the Australian representative for the Horror Writers of America (1994–95) and served as the second President of the Australian Horror Writers Association (2010–2011). His work has been nominated four times for the Ditmar Award, once for fiction and three times for the William Atheling Jr. Award for criticism. He has been a Finalist in both the Poetry and Criticism categories of the Australian Shadows Awards. He has contributed entries to such encyclopedias as S.T. Joshi and Stefan J. Dziemianowicz (eds) Supernatural Literature of the World (Greenwood Press, 2005, 3 vols) and June Pulliam and Tony Fonseca (eds), Ghosts in Popular Culture and Legend (ABC-Clio, 2016).
According to The Melbourne University Press Encyclopedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, "His name is now synonymous with Australian horror," and a Hodder & Stoughton press release stated that, "Leigh Blackmore is to horror what Glenn A. Baker is to rock and roll." He has also been recognised as "one of the leading weird poets of our era," and has been nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Rhysling Award. His fiction has appeared in Australia, the USA, the UK, France, Denmark and Sweden. Translations of his poetry have appeared in French and Italian.
Early life (1959–1976) Leigh Blackmore was born in Sydney, New South Wales, the son of Rod and Beth (James) Blackmore. One of his maternal grand-uncles was the eccentric Australian journalist Francis James. Blackmore's early hobbies included philately and phillumeny. He read extensively from an early age, particularly Look and Learn with its Trigan Empire science fiction comicstrip, and later the works of Geoffrey Willans, J.P. Martin, Norman Hunter and W.E. Johns. Blackmore's family moved to Armidale where Leigh attended kindergarten and part of First Class at the Armidale Demonstration School (now Armidale City Public School). He was raised by his parents in Methodism but refused automatic confirmation into the church at age 13, preferring to discuss ontology with his minister, who lent him works by Paul Tillich. On the family's return to Sydney, Blackmore completed Primary School at Lane Cove West Primary School. Around age nine, he was deeply affected by a reading of Rudyard Kipling's horror story "The Strange Ride of Morowbie Jukes", by Lucy Boston's fantasy novel The Castle of Yew and terrified by the TV broadcast of Richard Matheson's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" episode of The Twilight Zone. He also encountered horror fiction via Stephen P. Sutton's anthologies Tales to Tremble By and More Tales to Tremble By.
Education
He was later educated at North Sydney Boys High School (1971–1972) and Newcastle Boys' High School (1972–1976). In high school, after reading the science fiction anthology series "Out of This World" (edited by Mably Owen and Amabel Williams-Ellis), he graduated to devouring the works of Ray Bradbury, Peter Saxon, H. Rider Haggard, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Leslie Charteris, and became a keen enthusiast of sword and sorcery fiction as represented by Lin Carter's Flashing Swords anthologies and Thongor series novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian tales, Michael Moorcock's Elric sequence and others, and horror fiction (especially the Weird Tales school, including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Donald Wandrei and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos), discovering their work via anthologies edited by August Derleth, Peter Haining, Karl Edward Wagner (the Year's Best Horror Stories series), and via publications of Arkham House which he special-ordered via Space Age Books (Melbourne), then Australia's only specialist supplier of science fiction and fantasy books.
He was also greatly influenced by the Skywald 'horror mood' comics (Nightmare, Psycho and Scream) and Warren Publishing's stable of horror comics such as Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, and the film magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.