Lucy Ward

Lucy Ward is a writer and former journalist for the Guardian and Independent. Her debut book, The Empress and the English Doctor (Oneworld, 2022), tells the extraordinary true story of how Catherine the Great had herself inoculated against smallpox by a Quaker physician from Essex, using her example to promote the forerunner of vaccination across her empire but also to define and enhance her own leadership at home and abroad. The book was widely reviewed, sold in Russia, China, Brazil and Germany, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Pushkin Prize.

In 2022-23, Lucy led a campaign to save a work by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Omai, for the nation, after it was put up for sale by its owner for £50 million. The painting, now renamed Portrait of Mai, was bought jointly by the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and will alternate between the two locations. Mai, an instant celebrity when he travelled to Britain from Tahiti in 1774, is the subject of Lucy’s next book, to be published by Ithaka Press in 2026.

Lucy grew up in Manchester, and studied Early and Middle English, with Archaeology, at Balliol College, Oxford. She has three children and lives in Cambridge.