She associated with Britain's Young Communist League members at the time of the Spanish Civil War, in which she lost two lovers, and eventually joined the movement.
[4] After working as a journalist in World War II, during which she married and started a family, she began to write children's fiction.
[5] In 1968 Leila Berg convened a symposium with Michael Duane, A.S. Neill, John Holt and the radical Scottish educationalist Robert Mackenzie convened at Berg’s house for an informal symposium on education, in which Duane complained that teacher trainees – the “successes” of the education system – were “totally psychologically dependent on an authority", and along with Michael Duane, John Holt and A.S. Neill, again, Berg sat on the editorial advisory committee for the periodical Children’s Rights (launched in 1971) and contributed to a ground-breaking collection, Children’s Rights (1971).
[6] Leila Berg began writing in 1948 and quickly became known for her series of "Chunky" novels, about a little boy who preferred his bread in chunks, rather than slices; then for the Little Pete books which were picked up for the BBC's Listen with Mother.
In the 1960s Berg began writing in a more realistic and gritty style, for younger children from 1968 to 1983 as part of the Nippers series which she established for Macmillan.
This was an influential move designed to bring children's books closer to ordinary urban life and away from the Janet and John reader style, and probably the cosiness of Enid Blyton's realm, a widespread influence in that period.