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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.
Leslie Samuel Phillips was an English actor. He achieved prominence in the 1950s, playing smooth, upper-class comic roles utilising his "Ding dong" and "Hello" catchphrases. He appeared in the Carry On and Doctor in the House film series as well as the long-running BBC radio comedy series The Navy Lark. In his later career, Phillips took on dramatic parts including a BAFTA-nominated role alongside Peter O'Toole in Venus (2006). He provided the voice of the Sorting Hat in three of the Harry Potter films.
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.
Mariella Frostrup is a journalist and presenter, known in British television and radio mainly for arts programmes.
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.
Caitlin Davies is an English author, historian, journalist and teacher. She has written several books about social history and women's history. Her historical works have focused on swimmers, female prisoners, female criminals, and female private investigators.
The William Hill Sports Book of the Year is an annual British sports writing award sponsored by bookmaker William Hill. It was first presented in 1989, and was conceived by Graham Sharpe of William Hill, and John Gaustad, founder of the Sports Pages bookshop. As of 2020, the remuneration is £30,000, and a leather-bound copy of their book. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £3,000.
Tahmima Anam is a Bangladeshi-born British writer, novelist and columnist. Her first novel, A Golden Age (2007), was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. Her follow-up novel, The Good Muslim, was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She is the granddaughter of Abul Mansur Ahmed and daughter of Mahfuz Anam.
Marina Claire Wheeler is a British lawyer and writer. As a barrister, she specialises in public law, including human rights, and is a member of the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal. She was appointed Queen's Counsel in 2016.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Philip Jonathan Clifford Mould is an English art dealer, London gallery owner, art historian, writer and broadcaster. He has made a number of major art discoveries, including works of Thomas Gainsborough, Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Lawrence.
Lucy Worsley is a British historian, author, curator and television presenter. She is joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television and Channel 5 series on historical topics.
Susanna Mary Clarke is an English author known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. The novel became a best-seller.
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.
Reni Eddo-Lodge is a British journalist and author, whose writing primarily focuses on feminism and exposing structural racism. She has written for a range of publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The Voice, BuzzFeed, Vice, i-D and Dazed & Confused, and is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
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.
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.