Leigh Radford: The Book Is About Trying To Outmaneuver Death
In this interview, author Leigh Radford discusses the personal loss that helped inspire her debut novel, One Yellow Eye.
Leigh Radfordtrained as a broadcast journalist. She produced and presented arts and entertainment content and documentaries for British commercial radio, BBC Radio, The Times, and more. A former book publicist, she is a 2023 graduate of Faber Academy. She is currently developing content for film and television through her production company, Kenosha Kickers. Learn more at LeighRadfordAuthor.com.
In this interview, Leigh discusses the personal loss that helped inspire her debut novel, One Yellow Eye, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Leigh Radford
Literary agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Book title: One Yellow Eye
Publisher: Gallery Books
Release date: July 15, 2025
Genre/category: Horror; science fiction
Elevator pitch: After a viral apocalypse one scientist will risk everything to save the life of the only zombie left behind: her husband.
What prompted you to write this book?
Throughout 2020, while the world was battling COVID, I was nursing my father. His leukemia diagnosis became terminal. As we went into lockdown, I moved in with my parents so that I could help manage his treatment and be their envoy out in the world: doing the shopping, collecting prescriptions, driving him back and forth to London for grueling chemotherapy. It was a scary time because my father had zero immunity—the common cold could have killed him—so the threat of a new and uncontrollable virus was very real for us and for him. I will always be grateful for lockdown because it afforded me so much extra time with my father in the last six months of his life. We laughed a lot even though his decline was agonizing to watch. We went to such great lengths as a family to keep him alive despite knowing it would be in vain. I wrote One Yellow Eye because I needed to process what had happened to him, and also to me. The book is about trying to outmaneuver death, along with the pain of losing someone in slow motion, right before your eyes, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I had the idea in early 2020 but then shelved the book because I was too focused on my father to write. I picked it up again in September 2022 when I joined a writing course as motivation to try and actually finish a manuscript—something I tried and failed to do previously—and over six months, I wrote about 45,000 words. I really solidified the characters and the plot during this time. I was taken on by a literary agent in July 2023 and wrote the rest of the book that summer. By October 2023, the book had sold to a U.K. publisher, then in April last year, Gallery bought it for the U.S. Three years of intensive work from starting to write the novel in earnest, through production, to publication. And nothing major has changed with the story along the way.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Transitioning from being a lone writer who's plagued by self-doubt to someone working with a supportive team of incredibly well-read, generous, talented people has been very humbling. That’s been the most surprising and wonderful thing for me, finding other people who care about my writing and are invested in it. I’ll never take that for granted. Writing can be a lonely business whereas this helped make the process feel more collaborative, which is lovely. I always thought I was rather self-contained. I didn’t realize I was someone who would benefit so much from frequent pep talks!
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
My phenomenal editor at Gallery, Kim, can just cut right through any of my esoteric waffle and point out the obvious solution to any problem I might be stuck on with the writing. I feel that the ending of the novel is much stronger now, thanks to Kim essentially saying, “Duh, shouldn’t it just be this?” The objectivity of the editor is magical.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope it’s an entertaining read. I hope they feel it has heart to it. I hope it comforts anyone who is struggling with grief or going through a tough period in their lives. That things hurt when we care about them, and that even when life feels very bleak, the ability to laugh at it is powerful. I also hope that people who never met my father will remember him as someone rare and precious and very much worth fighting for.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Learn who to listen to. The writing course I took taught me that while everyone will have an opinion, their opinions won’t have equal weight. Some people will be overly negative for the sake of it, others much too positive to be credible. But there were a few writers on the course who could absolutely floor you with their insight. Their feedback still resonates with me, and I write with it in mind. When you’re starting out as a writer, it’s easy to take on board everyone else’s advice. In doing so, you can lose sight of where you were headed with your story, your voice becoming diluted in the process as it filters through diverging opinions. It’s absolutely fine to listen to feedback, to consider it, and then to discount it. Learn to listen out for the real pearls of wisdom that you can apply to your own work. Those incisive first readers are to be found and treasured.
