She was Professor of German Literature at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where she taught for nearly 30 years, before she moved to London in 2009.
[2] A Member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (Darmstadt), she has written extensively on post-war German literature, including on such authors as Alfred Andersch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Jurek Becker, Thomas Bernhard, Günter Grass, Ruth Klüger, W. G. Sebald, and Peter Weiss.
[3] Heidelberger-Leonard is the general editor of the 9-volume edition of the collected works of Jean Améry (Klett Cotta, Stuttgart, 2002-2008).
[6] Heidelberger-Leonard's most recent work is an intellectual biography of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002.
See also: Gedächtnis und Widerstand, Festschrift für Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, edited by Mireille Tabah with Sylvia Weiler and Christian Poetini.