John Lindsay AM, FRSL (20 October 1900 – 8 March 1990) was an Australian-born writer. He was born in Melbourne, but spent his formative years in Brisbane. He was the eldest son of Norman Lindsay and brother of author Philip Lindsay.

John Lindsay was born on 20 October 1900 in Melbourne, Colony of Victoria. He was educated at Brisbane Grammar School and the University of Queensland under J. L. Michie, from which he graduated with first class honours in Greek and Latin. On 27 October 1922 at the district registrar's office, Waverton, he married Janet Beaton, granddaughter of W. B. Dalley. He started his literary career in 1923 as a poet with a book Fauns and Ladies, illustrated by his father. In the 1920s he contributed stories and poems to a popular weekly magazine, The Bulletin, as well as editing the literary magazines Vision (with his father Norman) and London Aphrodite.

Lindsay founded, with P. R. Stephensen and John Kirtley, the Fanfrolico Press for fine publishing, initially in North Sydney. He left Australia in 1926, never to return.

Lindsay and P. R. Stephensen established two short-lived magazines, Vision and The London Aphrodite, which were published by the Fanfrolico Press in the 1920s. In the 1930s the Fanfrolico Press ceased as a business. Lindsay described that experience later in the autobiographical work Fanfrolico and After (1962). He moved to the left politically, writing for Left Review and joining the Communist Party of Great Britain at the end of the decade, becoming an activist. He started writing novels while living in Cornwall. Lindsay's earliest novels were set in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire; they included Cressida's First Lover (1931), Rome For Sale and Caesar Is Dead (both 1934). Lindsay's historical fiction also includes 1649: A Novel of a Year (1938), a social realist novel that begins with the execution of Charles I of England and explores the first year of the Republic through the eyes of ordinary citizens. He wrote 1649 as an anti-fascist novel. He collaborated with Edgell Rickword amongst others.

During World War II, Lindsay served in the British Army initially in the Royal Signal Corps. From 1943, he worked for the War Office on theatrical scripts. That year, he began an affair with the actor and activist Ann Davies which was announced as a marriage although Lindsay was still married. Ann was popularly known as Ann Lindsay. Ann died in 1954.

After the war Lindsay lived in Castle Hedingham, becoming the subject of defamation and suppression because of his Communist standpoint. Being a prolific writer, he published 169 books including 38 novels and 25 volumes of translations (from Latin, Greek, Russian, and Polish), as well as art, literary, classical, historical and political studies, biographies and autobiographies written from a Marxist perspective.

Lindsay was a vegetarian for all his adult life.

Lindsay was awarded the Soviet Order of the Badge of Honour in 1967, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Queensland in 1973. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1946), the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1982), and appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (1981).