LEAH GARRETT
ABOUT
Award-winning author and historian uncovering the overlooked lives that shaped history.
ABOUT LEAH GARRETT
Writing the Stories That History Nearly Forgot
Leah Garrett is the award-winning author of X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis and the forthcoming The Flight Nurses’ War.
Published in October 2026 by Basic Books in the United States and Atlantic Books in the United Kingdom, The Flight Nurses’ War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa tells the story of the pioneering American nurses who risked their lives to evacuate and care for wounded servicemen during some of the most devastating battles of the Pacific War.
Leah is also the author of X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat The Nazis, published by Harper Collins in the United States and Penguin in the United Kingdom, as well as four previous books. Her earlier work, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel, received the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Modern Jewish History and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award.
Leah is a professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Her life and academic career have taken her around the world. She spent several years of her childhood in West Africa; she was a Fulbright Scholar in Israel and travelled extensively in Egypt and Jordan; she lived in Cambridge, England and studied at Oxford University, England. She won a place at the Art Institute of Chicago and then went back to Africa to work in a Lesotho orphanage for a year. She was a Research Professor at Monash University in Australia for ten years. In 2019 she returned to her birthplace of New York City.
Leah’s interest in World War Two began with her own family. Many of her relatives were veterans, creating a personal connection to the history she would later investigate in depth. While researching X Troop, she worked extensively in archives, secured the release of previously classified government documents, and interviewed the surviving X Troop commandos and their families.
That combination of rigorous archival research, personal testimony, and a determination to recover overlooked lives continues to shape Leah’s work as a historian and writer.