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. Other well-known texts include Sexuality in Western Art and 20th Century Latin American Art. The latter is regarded as the best concise account of a notoriously complex subject. It has been translated into Spanish and is widely used in Latin America itself. In addition to writing on art he has written extensively on craft and on industrial design, where his books include The Story of Craft, A History of Industrial Design and A Concise History of Furniture. Other texts include American Realism (1994) and Ars Erotica (1997). He is also the author of Judy Chicago: An American Vision (1999, Watson- Guptill), the first full career survey of the work of the leading American feminist artist. His books have been translated into many languages, among them French, Italian, Spanish (where he has six titles in the Mundo del Arte series published by El Destino in Barcelona), German, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Korean and Chinese. Movements in Art appeared in October 2001 in Farsi. The translator is the director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. 

His photographs have been the subject of solo exhibitions in London, Brussels, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Rome, Kuala Lumpur,St Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro and Valencia. 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.

A project that is gently hauling its way over the horizon is for a show of my photos in a museum in Helsinki. I will know more about this by the end of March.

A book of his Collected and Selected Poems entitled Changing Shape was published by the Carcanet Press in February 2002. 

He has lectured in numerous countries including the United States, France, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Australia, Turkey, Iran, Korea, Hong Kong. Yugoslavia, Australia and New Zealand. 

In Britain he was for many years a well-known broadcaster, appearing regularly on the BBC arts discussion programme The Critics and its successor Critics' Forum. His appearances on these programmes spanned a period of twenty years. 

He has written for many leading British newspapers and periodicals, among them The Times of London (where at one time he had a regular column), the London Evening Standard (whose critic he was for two years), the New Statesman, the Spectator, the London Magazine and Encounter. He currently writes regularly for Art Review, and also for Index on Censorship. He also writes for La Vanguardia in Barcelona. 

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.