Lynn Picknett is a writer, researcher, and lecturer on the paranormal, the occult, and historical and religious mysteries.
Born in Folkestone, Kent, England, in April 1947, Picknett grew up in an alleged haunted house in York, attending Park Grove Junior School and Queen Anne Grammar School. After graduating from university with an Upper 2nd (hons) degree in English Literature, she briefly became a teacher, a shop assistant, and a stand-up comic before moving to London in 1971 to join Marshall Cavendish Publications as a trainee sub-editor.
In the 1980s, she was Deputy Editor on The Unexplained and contributor to many other publications. She was also a regular contributor on various radio shows, including Michael van Straten and Clive Bull's on LBC and Talk Radio. She was also a television presenter for both Anglia and Southern TV.
In 1990 she was guest curator for the Royal Photographic Society's exhibition The Unexplained at Bath, performing the same function in 1999 for the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford.
In the early 1990s, she teamed up with fellow researcher and writer Clive Prince. Their first book, Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History, was the first mainstream work to reveal how all the so-called miraculous characteristics of the Turin Shroud could easily be reproduced only using a pinhole camera (camera obscura), and argued that Leonardo da Vinci not only faked it, but used his own face for the model of Jesus.