While working in broadcasting in London and New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s, he had short stories and poems published in various magazines and journals, and wrote stage and radio plays.
[3][6][1] Notably, in 1961, Leeming interviewed Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath for the BBC, in a radio broadcast entitled Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership.
[9][10] Leeming's early poems and stories were published in various English journals, including The London Magazine and The Guinness Book of Poetry.
[13] It was described by New Zealand writer James K. Baxter in 1971 as "masterly", and as "one of the documents to which I turn for reassurance in my private clumsy labours to undo the harm the Catholic Church does to her young".
This award allowed Leeming to spend a year in Menton, France as a writer in residence at the Villa Isola Bella, where Katherine Mansfield lived from 1919 to 1920.
[21][22] Victor Billot, reviewing the collection for Landfall, described some of the earlier unpublished works as "windows into a vanished world", and said his later poems "develop down strange and wonderful branches".