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Eric Lambert (19 January 1918 – 16 April 1966) was an Australian author and a member of the Communist Party of Australia.

Born in London, Eric Lambert's family soon emigrated to Sydney.

He left school at the age of 17 and worked in a garage. In 1940 he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force and served in the Middle East and Papua New Guinea. He was discharged in 1945, determined to work for the cause of peace, soon meeting and joining forces with Frank Hardy, who was at a similar stage with his first novel, Power without Glory. {(Frank Hardy]] had soon convinced him to join the Communist Party. He started writing on a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant and self-published his first novel The Twenty Thousand Thieves which was later taken up by Frederick Muller Ltd. London, in 1952. It was based on his memories of WWII and despite its reception becoming caught up in Cold War politics, it sold three quarters of a million copies. In 1950 he was married to the school-teacher Joyce Margaret Boyd Smith whom he later divorced.

With Frank Hardy and Stephen Murray Smith, Lambert co-founded the Melbourne Realist Writers Association and collaborated with its members to edit and produce its Journal, the Realist Writer. In the mid 50s he was a co-founder of the journal Overland. In 1955 he attended the World Assembly for Peace in Helsinki and afterwards stayed on in London.

Hearing of disturbing events in Hungary, he went across the border into Hungary without a visa during the 1956 uprising and was horrified by the aggression of the Soviets against the young people who were demonstrating for independence and peace. Back in London, he attempted to get his reports published in the Communist Party press to no avail and left the Party embittered with communism, writing about events in Hungary for The Daily Telegraph, much to the chagrin of his former communist colleagues.

He remarried in 1963 to Phyllis Daphne Hogarth, adopting her six year-old daughter Virginia and they had one daughter together, Francesca. Sadly, Eric Lambert died of heart-failure two years later in 1966.

He had continued writing throughout his time in Europe, and apart from drawing further on his war experience he also dealt with the Eureka Stockade, in The Five Bright Stars (1954) and Ned Kelly in Kelly (1964).

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Eric Lambert", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0