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Lara Maiklem FSA (born 1971) [1] is a British author, editor and publishing consultant, known for her writing and speaking on mudlarking. She has been mudlarking since 2012. She was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 2022.
Maiklem grew up on a dairy farm in Surrey. She read sociology and social anthropology at Newcastle University before moving to London where she worked in publishing. She now lives with her partner and children on the Kent coast [2]
During her childhood Maiklem was fascinated by the past in the form of pottery shards, glass bottle stoppers, fossils and clay pipes, which she found in the garden and fields of the family's farm. [3] After moving to London she began to mudlark on the tidal banks of the River Thames where she scavenged for objects that had been lost and dropped into the river. Some of Maiklem's most treasured discoveries are a Tudor shoe, a medieval pilgrim badge, a complete Iron Age pot, a Roman auxiliary soldier's sword scabbard chape and a 16th-century sword.
In August 2019, Maiklem's first book Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames was published by Bloomsbury in the UK, Australia and New Zealand and under the title Mudlark: Searching for London's Past Along the River Thames by Liveright in the US and Canada. Mudlarking appeared in a cartoon by Nick Newman in Private Eye.[ citation needed ]
The Guardian called it "A fascinating insight into the discarded objects and lost things that wash up on the foreshore". [4] The Daily Telegraph considered her description of the fog to be "worthy of Dickens or Joseph Conrad". [5] Literary Review described it as "A lovely, lyrical, gently meandering book, filled with fascinating diversions and detail". [6]
On publication it became a Sunday Times Bestseller and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in August 2019. Mudlarking was Book of the Month at Foyles, an Observer Book of the Year 2019, a Daily Express Greatest Read 2019 and an Apple Books pick for 2019. Mudlarking won the 2020 Indie Award for Non Fiction. [7]
In 2021 Maiklem Bloomsbury published her second book A Field Guide to Larking: Beachcombing, Mudlarking, Fieldwalking and More, an illustrated guide to how to search for lost objects and how to identify what you find.
Maiklem has made radio and television appearances on the BBC, Smithsonian Channel, Travel Channel, Channel 5, NPR and ABC Australia. Maiklem did a TED Talk in October 2019 [8] and a Google Talk in September 2019. [9] She wrote a short series about mudlarking for BBC Radio 3, has written articles for the Guardian, [10] the Telegraph, the Financial Times, Daily Express, BBC Countryfile and The Spectator [11] and has spoken on mudlarking at private events and festivals.
Sophie Dahl is an English author and former fashion model. Her first novel, The Man with the Dancing Eyes, was published in 2003 followed by Playing With the Grown-ups in 2007. In 2009, she wrote Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights, a cookery book which formed the basis for a six-part BBC Two series named The Delicious Miss Dahl. In 2011, she published her second cookery book From Season to Season. Her first children's book, Madame Badobedah, was released in 2019. She is the daughter of Tessa Dahl and Julian Holloway and the granddaughter of author Roald Dahl, actress Patricia Neal, and actor Stanley Holloway.
A mudlark is someone who scavenges the banks and shores of rivers for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries. The practice of searching the banks of rivers for items continues in the modern era, with newer technology such as metal detectors sometimes being employed to search for metal valuables that may have washed ashore.
Dame Stella Rimington is a British author and former Director General of MI5, a position she held from 1992 to 1996. She was the first female DG of MI5, and the first DG whose name was publicised on appointment. In 1993, Rimington became the first DG of MI5 to pose openly for cameras at the launch of a brochure outlining the organisation's activities.
David Edward Williams, known professionally as David Walliams, is an English comedian, actor, writer, and television personality. He is best known for his work with Matt Lucas on the BBC sketch comedy series Little Britain (2003–2006) and Come Fly With Me (2010–2011). From 2012 to 2022, Walliams was a judge on the television talent show competition Britain's Got Talent on ITV. He is also a writer of children's books, having sold more than 37 million copies worldwide.
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Dame Winifred Mary Beard, is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.
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Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby; and Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. In April 2021, she was long listed for the Orwell Prize for Journalism.
Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.
Dame Hannah Mary Rothschild is a British author, businesswoman, philanthropist and documentary filmmaker. In addition to screenplays and journalism, she has published a biography and three novels. She sits on charitable and financial boards. In August 2015, she became the first woman to chair the board of trustees of the National Gallery in London.
Owen Matthews is a British writer, historian and journalist. His first book, Stalin's Children, was shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, the Orwell Prize for political writing, and France's Prix Médicis Etranger. His books have been translated into 28 languages. He is a former Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief for Newsweek.
Laura Cumming is a British journalist who is the art critic of The Observer newspaper, a position she has held since 1999. Before that she worked for The Guardian, the New Statesman and the BBC. In addition to her career in journalism, Cumming has written well-received books on self-portraits in art and the discovery of a lost portrait by Diego Velázquez in 1845. The Vanishing Man was a New York Times bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2016.
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