Franco Lucentini (December 24, 1920 - August 5, 2002) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and editor of anthologies.Born in Rome on 24 December 1920 to Emma Marzi and Venanzio Lucentini, a miller from Marche and later the owner of a bakery in Rome.While studying Philosophy at the University of Rome, Lucentini was one of the organizers of a practical joke against the fascist regime: on 5 May 1941 he and a friend distributed among other students paper streamers. When unrolled during a public meeting, they revealed writings such as "Down with the war!", "Down with Hitler!" and "Long live freedom!". Lucentini was arrested and spent two months in prison.Lucentini graduated in February 1943. Called to arms in 1943, he was refused the admission to the training to become an officer. After the Armistice, the Allied armed forces put to use his writing skills as a junior editor for the "United Nations News" press agency in Naples.

After the war, Lucentini worked in Rome for ANSA news agency; later, associated with ONA news agency, he went to Prague and Vienna. The atmosphere of postwar Vienna gave him the inspiration for the novella I compagni sconosciuti. After a brief time again in Rome, in 1949 he left for Paris where he was employed in several jobs (deliveryman, teacher, masseur).While in Paris, he first met the two most important people in his life: Simone Benne Darses, 12 years older than him, who was to become his lifetime wife; and, in 1952, Carlo Fruttero, with whom a life-long literary collaboration began in 1957, when Lucentini moved to Turin, where both of them worked for Einaudi publishing house. Lucentini frequently traveled to Paris in scouting assignments for Einaudi looking for new authors and titles to bring to Italy. He discovered, amongst other's, Jorge Luis Borges and was responsible for the translation from the original Spanish versions to Italian. Lucentini also translated several foreign books for Einaudi from many different languages including Chinesse and Japanese.As a very successful and appreciated team, Fruttero & Lucentini wrote books and worked in publishing, directing book series and magazines (Il Mago, Urania), and editing fiction anthologies, for Einaudi publishing house and, since 1961, for Mondadori.

In 1972 Lucentini and Fruttero began writing for Turin-based newspaper La Stampa (then directed by Alberto Ronchey), writing the column "L'Agenda di F. & L.", commenting with humour and irony on current facts; they also wrote for L'Espresso and Epoca.Their first book was the poetry collection L'idraulico non verrà, in 1971. But the first largely successful work was the crime novel La donna della domenica (1972), set in Turin. The novel was made into the same title film by Luigi Comencini; the next novel, A che punto è la notte (1979), shared the same protagonist, il commissario Santamaria. In the following decades they wrote together several novels and non-fiction books, till "F&L" became a known and appreciated trademark.In 2000 Lucentini was awarded a special Campiello award for his life's work.

Afflicted by a lung cancer, Lucentini took his life on 5 August 2002, throwing himself down the stairs of his flat's building in piazza Vittorio Veneto, 1, in Turin. His friend and co-author Carlo Fruttero observed: "He had no pills, it was difficult to get into the river, and he would have been rescued anyway, the train was too far. Before dying he would have thought, what's all the buzz about death?, let's get it over with".Lucentini sometimes used the pseudonyms Sydney Ward and P. Kettridge; he used the first one mostly to byline short stories of his own in anthologies of science-fiction or war stories by foreign authors.