Naomi’s latest book, 13 Park Lane, an historical novel based on a true crime, will be published by Bloodhound Books on 28 October 2024.
Naomi Clifford has been a committed historian since the age of eight, when a ‘Jackdaw’ folder of original documents about the slave trade fired up her imagination about individual people forgotten by history. To this day she likes nothing better than rooting out and giving voice to those whose lives have not yet been told.
The child of US migrants, Naomi Clifford grew up in north London, attended South Hampstead High School and read History at Bristol University. Various editorial jobs followed, including a two-year stint working in Nashville, Tennessee, and after her return to London, 30 years working for TV magazines including Radio Times, TV Times and What’s on TV, as well as freelancing as a book editor and website content curator.
In 2010, as part of a campaign to restore the war memorial at Stockwell, she researched the 574 men listed on it and self-published the results as These Were Our Sons under the name Naomi Lourie Klein.
In 2014, while trawling the archives, Naomi chanced on the story of the abduction of a teenage heiress in 1817, and fixed her focus on women of the Georgian era. The resulting book, The Disappearance of Maria Glenn, was published by Pen & Sword in 2016.
This was followed by Women and the Gallows 1797–1837 (2017), an exploration of the stories of 131 female ‘unfortunate wretches’ hanged in England and Wales, and The Murder of Mary Ashford (2018), which casts a fresh eye on a notorious and unsolved 1817 rape-murder and uncovers, for the first time the likely truth about what happened.
In 2020 Caret Press published Under Fire, about the life and diaries of June Spencer, an ambulance driver during the London Blitz.
She is a contributing editor to vauxhallhistory.org and a podcaster on thedoorpodcast.com.
Naomi Clifford is available for interview, broadcast days and other media events.
