Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at Kingston, Jamaica. He moved to Britain in 1946, and was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History. Subsequently he was an Education Officer in the R.A.F., then worked in advertising for ten years before becoming a freelance author. He is now an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet (member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), an anthologist and a practising photographer. He has published more than a hundred books in all, including a biography of Joan of Arc (recently republished by Penguin in paperback as a 'classic biography'), a historical novel, and more than sixty books about art, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. He is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art, with sales for some titles totalling over 250,000 copies. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date, and has been completely updated five times since first publication. A new edition was published in March 2001.   He has been curator of a number of exhibitions, including three Peter Moores Projects at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, (surveys of contemporary British art), The New British Painting (which toured US venues in 1988-90) and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art. He has been a jury member for the John Moores prize exhibition in Liverpool, and for biennials in Cairo, Sharjah, Alexandria and Belgrade. He was recently curator of 'New British Art'. at the Orion Gallery in Ostend (April-June 2001), and of 'New Classicism: Artists of the Ideal', which opened at Palazzo Forti, Verona (April-September 2002). His photographs have been the subject of solo exhibitions in London, Brussels, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Rome, Kuala Lumpur, and St Petersburg. A book of his photographs, 'Flesh & Stone', was published by the French imprint Ipso Facto Publishers, in October 2000. There was an American museum show at the Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio, in February/March 2003. His work as a photographer is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and the Frissiras Museum, Athens.