Laurence Edward Alan Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 – 13 May 1997) was an English poet, novelist and screenwriter, who was brought up in the small village of Slad in Gloucestershire.

His most notable work is the autobiographical trilogy Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991).

After fighting in the First World War with the Royal West Kent Regiment, Lee's father did not return to the family.

His brother Jack (1913-2002) was to become a film director;[1] although close when younger, they would fall out in later life, being "on non-speaking terms for 25 years".

This gave him his first smattering of politicisation and was where he met the composer Benjamin Frankel and the "Cleo" who appears in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

"[5] At 20 Lee worked as an office clerk and a builder's labourer, and lived in London for a year before leaving for Vigo, in northwest Spain, in the summer of 1935.

[11] Lee met Mary Garman's married sister, Lorna Wishart, in Cornwall in 1937, and they had an affair lasting until she left him for Lucian Freud in 1943.

[14] In 1950 Lee married Catherine Francesca Polge, whose father was Provençal and whose mother was another of the Garman sisters, Helen; they had one daughter, Jessie.

The poem "Twelfth Night" from My Many-coated Man was set for unaccompanied mixed choir by American composer Samuel Barber in 1968.

Other works include A Rose for Winter, about a trip he made to Andalusia 15 years after the civil war; Two Women (1983), a story of Lee's courtship of and marriage to Kathy, daughter of Helen Garman; The Firstborn (1964), about the birth and childhood of their daughter Jessy (christened Jesse); and I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of occasional writing.

In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Lee writes of his stay in Almuñécar, a Spanish fishing village which he calls "Castillo".

An archive recording of Lee's voice was used for the narration of the Carlton Television film Cider with Rosie (1998), which was first broadcast after his death.