Lucy Worsley

Lucy Worsley OBE’s Agatha Christie, A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton, 2022) was a Sunday Times number one best seller.  It followed the best-selling Jane Austen at Home (2017) and Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow (2019) with the same publisher.

Other non-fiction includes A Very British Murder (BBC Books) and with Faber & Faber If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, The Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court and Cavalier: The Story of a Seventeenth Century Playboy. She has also published four historical novels for younger readers with Bloomsbury.

As one of television’s best-known historians, Lucy has pioneered a new kind of storytelling, personal, playful and interrogative.  She has presented multiple shows for the BBC and in North America for PBS. Suffragettes with Lucy Worsley won the BAFTA in 2018 and in 2019 she was awarded an OBE for services to history and heritage.

Lucy is also known for Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley, her BBC Radio 4 series and podcast now in its seventh season, which offers a feminist revisionist perspective on female criminals.  It was in the BBC’s top ten most downloaded podcasts in 2024.  She is a popular live performer, playing to sell-out audiences across the UK with her one-woman shows about Jane Austen and Agatha Christie.

For twenty years until 2024 Lucy also served as Chief Curator at the independent charity Historic Royal Palaces, responsible for opening the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace to more than three million visitors a year.  Prior to that, she studied history at Oxford before working at the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and English Heritage.

Her next book, coloured by her experiences behind the scenes at Britain’s historic royal palaces, will be Queens and Kings, An Unusually Personal History of the Monarchy.  It’s published by Hodder & Stoughton in September 2026.

She has three-quarters of a million social media followers and her weekly newsletter MY LIFE IN THE PAST (https://lucyworsley.substack.com/) is a Substack bestseller.

Photo courtesy of Robert Shiret