Laurie Lee was an English poet and prose writer, born in 1914, best loved for the lyrical, sun-warmed memoirs of his Gloucestershire boyhood.
He grew up in the village of Slad, in the Cotswold valley whose landscape and characters he would immortalise, and as a young man set out on foot to see the world - walking across Spain in 1935, earning his way by playing the violin, and returning two years later to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
Out of those experiences came the three volumes of autobiography that made his name and remain his enduring achievement. Cider with Rosie, a golden evocation of a rural childhood in the years around the First World War, became a beloved classic of English writing; As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning recounts his youthful journey to Spain; and A Moment of War tells of his return to the fighting. Alongside them he published several admired collections of poetry, beginning with The Sun My Monument.
A prose stylist of rare warmth and sensuous precision, appointed MBE in 1952, he wrote some of the most affectionately remembered evocations of the English countryside in the language.
