Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss.

His Lithuanian Jewish mother, Marsha ("Masha") Klonitsky (1905–1978),[3][4] emigrated to Canada in 1927 and was the daughter of Talmudic writer and rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline.

[12] His literary influences during this time included William Butler Yeats, Irving Layton (who taught political science at McGill and became both Cohen's mentor and his friend),[12] Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and Henry Miller.

[12] After completing his undergraduate degree, Cohen spent a term in the McGill Faculty of Law and then a year (1956–1957) at the Columbia University School of General Studies.

'[12] Cohen continued to write poetry and fiction throughout the 1960s and preferred to live in quasi-reclusive circumstances after he bought a house on Hydra, a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf.

The 1966 novel Beautiful Losers received a good deal of attention from the Canadian press and stirred up controversy because of a number of sexually graphic passages.

[23] In 1993 Cohen published Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs, and in 2006, after 10 years of delays, additions, and rewritings, Book of Longing.

Collins told Bill Moyers, during a television interview, that she felt Cohen's Jewish background was an important influence on his words and music.

After the European tour of 1976, Cohen again attempted a new change in his style and arrangements: his new 1977 record, Death of a Ladies' Man was co-written and produced by Phil Spector.

"[58] In the early 1980s, Cohen co-wrote (with Lewis Furey) the rock musical film Night Magic starring Carole Laure and Nick Mancuso.

They also gave a series of highly emotional and politically controversial concerts in Poland, which had been under martial law just two years before, and performed the song "The Partisan", regarded as the hymn of the Polish Solidarity movement.

[75] The album track "Everybody Knows" from I'm Your Man and "If It Be Your Will" in the 1990 film Pump Up the Volume helped expose Cohen's music to a wider audience.

Three tracks from the album – "Waiting for the Miracle", "The Future" and "Anthem" – were featured in the movie Natural Born Killers, which also promoted Cohen's work to a new generation of US listeners.

He began to contribute regularly to The Leonard Cohen Files fan website, emailing new poems and drawings from Book of Longing and early versions of new songs, like "A Thousand Kisses Deep" in September 1998[80] and Anjani Thomas's story sent on May 6, 1999, the day they were recording "Villanelle for our Time"[81] (released on 2004's Dear Heather album).

[25] After two years of production, Cohen returned to music in 2001 with the release of Ten New Songs, featuring a major influence from producer and co-composer Sharon Robinson.

As light as the previous album was dark, Dear Heather reflects Cohen's own change of mood – he said in a number of interviews that his depression had lifted in recent years, which he attributed to Zen Buddhism.

In an interview following his induction into the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame, Cohen explained that the album was intended to be a kind of notebook or scrapbook of themes, and that a more formal record had been planned for release shortly afterwards, but that this was put on ice by his legal battles with his ex-manager.

"[83][j] Before embarking on his 2008–2010 world tour, and without finishing the new album that had been in work since 2006, Cohen contributed a few tracks to other artists' albums – a new version of his own "Tower of Song" was performed by him, Anjani Thomas and U2 in the 2006 tribute film Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man[85] (the video and track were included on the film's soundtrack and released as the B-side of U2's single "Window in the Skies", reaching No 1 in the Canadian Singles Chart).

Following a series of live performances that included Glass on keyboards, Cohen's recorded spoken text, four additional voices (soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass-baritone), and other instruments, and as well as screenings of Cohen's artworks and drawings, Glass' label Orange Mountain Music released a double CD of the work, titled Book of Longing.

In September, October and November 2008, Cohen toured Europe, including stops in Austria, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Italy, Germany, France and Scandinavia.

The 2009 world tour earned a reported $9.5 million, putting Cohen at number 39 on Billboard magazine's list of the year's top musical "money makers".

In 2011, Cohen's poetical output was represented in Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, in a selection Poems and Songs edited by Robert Faggen.

[145] Over a musical career that spanned nearly five decades, Mr. Cohen wrote songs that addressed—in spare language that could be both oblique and telling—themes of love and faith, despair and exaltation, solitude and connection, war and politics.

Centred on a group of small-time criminals in Montreal, one of the film's characters idolizes Cohen as a symbol of her dreams for a better life, obsessively rereading his writings and rewatching Ladies and Gentlemen.

His gift as a songwriter and performer was rather to provide commentary and companionship amid the gloom, offering a wry, openhearted perspective on the puzzles of the human condition".

[174] Suzanne Vega spoke of Leonard Cohen's admirers in a New Yorker interview, saying that knowing his work was like being part of a "secret society" among people of her generation.

[205] As was his wish, Cohen was laid to rest with a Jewish rite, in a simple pine casket, in a family plot in the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim cemetery on Mount Royal.

[211] The city of Montreal held a tribute concert to Cohen in December 2016, titled "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" after a prose poem in his novel Beautiful Losers.

lang, Elvis Costello, Feist, Adam Cohen, Patrick Watson, Sting, Damien Rice, Courtney Love, The Lumineers, Lana Del Rey and others.

Loxosceles coheni, a species of recluse spiders from Iran, was described by arachnologists Alireza Zamani, Omid Mirshamsi and Yuri M. Marusik.