Edward Lucie-Smith

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (27 February 1933 – 11 July 2026), known as Edward Lucie-Smith, was a Jamaican-born British writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster. He was highly prolific in these fields, writing or editing over a hundred books, his subjects gradually shifting around the late 1960s from mostly literature to mostly art.

Life and career John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 27 February 1933, the son of Mary Frances (née Lushington) and John Dudley Lucie-Smith. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, then spent time in Paris. In 1954, he received a Bachelor of Arts from Merton College, Oxford.

After serving in the Royal Air Force as an education officer and working as a copywriter,

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1964. With Bernard Stone and George Rapp he was a director of the small press Turret Books, founded in 1965 in London. Wallace Southam set some of his poetry to music for Turret and Jupiter Records.

At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3. He was a contributor to The London Magazine, in which he wrote art reviews, and wrote regularly for the independent magazine ArtReview from the 1960s until the 2000s. A prolific writer, he penned more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

During his later years Lucie-Smith promoted drawings attributed to Francis Bacon owned by Italian journalist Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. However, Christie's, Sotheby's and the Francis Bacon Estate have not authenticated these works known as the 'Francis Bacon Italian Drawings'. Martin Harrison, the editor of the Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, does not include 'The Francis Bacon Italian Drawings' and does not see the hand of Bacon in these drawings.

His uncle Euan Lucie-Smith was one of the first mixed-heritage infantry officers in a regular British Army regiment, and the first killed in World War I.

Edward Lucie-Smith died on 11 July 2026, at the age of 93.