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Elisabeth Luard (née Longmore) is a food-writer, journalist, illustrator and broadcaster who has written over a dozen books on food as well as two novels and three memoirs.

Early life

Elisabeth was the child of career diplomats and spent much of her childhood in South America. She moved to England to attend boarding school in the 1950s and went on to Eastbourne School of Domestic Economy ("I learnt to be a housemaid and I know how to clean a chimney") for a year. She lived in Paris after that, then attended art school in London while working at Private Eye. ("I never told either of them that I was doing the other thing.") Here she met the writer and journalist Nicholas Luard, whom she later married. She became a painter and illustrator, exhibiting her work, and continues to illustrate her own books. She had also acquired fluency in French and Spanish, which stood her in good stead as a cookery writer.

. illustrates her own work.

Previous books include European Peasant Cookery (US The Old World Kitchen),  European Festival Food and Tapas, all of which are in print with Grub Street. Others include ClassicSpanish Cooking and Soups (Octopus), The Latin American Kitchen, The Food of Spain and Portugal and Food Adventure: Introducing your Child to Flavours around the World (Kyle Cathie) - written with daughter-in-law Frances Boswell, and Truffles (Frances Lincoln). I've just completed a four-year stint as Trustee Director of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery,contributes a monthly column to The Oldie Magazine, and is a member (on sabatical while I work out how to illustrate my work with photography rather than sketchbook)  of the team at online culinary magazine Zester Daily. Of my two novels published by Bantam in the 1980's,  the first, Emerald won a WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award. As a journalist, my work appears - or has appeared - regularly in  Country Living, Daily Mail,  The Scotsman, Country Life, Waitrose Food Illustrated, The Jewish Chronicle and the TLS.

May 2013 update:  My three memoirs-with-recipes, Family Life - birth, death and the whole damn thing, Still Life - cloudberries, klipfisk and what to do when the kids leave home and My Life as a Wife- love, liquor and what to do about the other woman are back in print in paperback from Bloomsbury UK.

November 2013 update:  The Old World Kitchen is back in print in the US with Melville House. Strapline on the handsome new cover is Mark Bittman's comment "The greatest cookbook you never heard of!" Funny, that. NB: European Festival Food has been retitled Seasonal European Dishes (Grub Street), a companion volume to Grub Street's paperback edition ofEuropean Peasant Cookery and Tapas.