Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, and was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School.

At the age on nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, as described in his book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter. Cider With Rosie (1959) has sold over six million copies worldwide, and was followed by two other volumes of autobiography: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991).

Laurie Lee also published four collections of poems, The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Packet Poems (1960) as well as The Voyage of Magellan (1948), a verse play for radio, A Rose for Winter (1955), which records his travels in Andalusia, The Firstborn (1964), I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of his writing, and Two Women (1983).

Laurie Lee died in May 1997. In its obituary the Guardian wrote, 'He has a nightingale inside him, a capacity for sensuous, lyrical precisions'.