Philippa Langley

With an enduring passion to tell stories that challenge our perception of established truths, Philippa Langley is an historian, best-selling author and award-winning producer who inaugurated and led the successful search to locate King Richard III’s grave in Leicester. Her 90-minute documentary, The King in the Car Park, about the search for King Richard, made with Channel Four and Darlow Smithson Productions, was aired on 4th February 2013 and commanded an audience of six million. Based on her original Looking For Richard Project, it became the channel's highest rated specialist factual show in its thirty-year history. It won the 2013 Royal Television Society Award for Best History Programme and was nominated for a 2014 BAFTA in the category of TV: Specialist Factual.  Her screenplay on the life of King Richard, the most controversial monarch in British history, is based on contemporary source materials from the king's lifetime. She was made an MBE by HM. The Queen, at Buckingham Palace in 2015.

Co-authored with Michael Jones her The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III was published in 2013 by John Murray in the UK and St Martin’s Press in the USA. In 2022, The Lost King film (dir. Sir Stephen Frears) told Philippa’s remarkable story. Her book was simultaneously released as a major film-tie, in The Lost King.

Her revelatory and acclaimed The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case was first published in the UK and USA in November 2023. The accompanying documentary: The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence made with Channel 4 and Brinkworth Productions won the AIB (Association of International Broadcasters) Award for Best Historical Documentary in 2024. The AIB Awards recognise the highest standards of journalism and factual productions across TV, radio and digital platforms. In 2025, following the conclusion of its ten-year Cold Case investigation the book was updated to: The Princes in the Tower: How History’s Greatest Cold Case Was Solved.