Leonard Sidney Woolf (/ˈwʊlf/; (1880-11-25)25 November 1880 – (1969-08-14)14 August 1969) was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant.

As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels.

Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902 but stayed there for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations held then.

After marriage, Woolf turned to writing and published his first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), which is based on his years in Ceylon.

On the introduction of conscription in 1916, during the First World War, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds and turned to politics and sociology.

Within ten years the Press had become a full-scale publishing house, issuing Virginia's novels, Leonard's tracts and, among other works, the first edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

[6] Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then-new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His dissertation Bartolus of Sassoferrato, his Position in the History of Medieval Political Thought was expanded to a book published by Cambridge University Press in 1913 in collaboration with his brother Philip.

He was cremated and his ashes were buried alongside his wife's beneath an elm tree in his beloved garden at Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex.