Edward Lucie-Smith

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (born 27 February 1933), known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is a Jamaican-born English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.

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, Lucie-Smith became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer).

He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.

He has been 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.

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of Mary Frances (née Lushington) and John Dudley Lucie-Smith.

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 has written more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3.

In addition he has curated a number of art exhibitions, including three Peter Moores projects at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, The New British Painting (1988–1990) and two retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

He is a curator of the Bermondsey Project Space.

In recent years Lucie-Smith has been promoting 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.