Miriam Lancewood

About Miriam Lancewood

Miriam Lancewood is a Bulgaria-based adventurer, author, bushcraft/survival expert, and former competitive athlete. She is best known for living a primitive, nomadic life in the wilderness for years, especially in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, and writing bestselling memoirs about it.
As a teenager and young adult she was a talented competitive pole vaulter who represented the Netherlands at the Youth Olympic Games. She studied Physical Education and worked as a PE teacher, including a year volunteering in Zimbabwe.
Around age 21–22 she traveled to India, where she met her New Zealand husband, Peter Raine, who is roughly 30 years older; they met when she was ~22 and he was ~52. They traveled extensively together through the Himalayas, Southeast Asia, and Papua New Guinea before settling for a time in New Zealand.
From about 2010 they left conventional life and gave up most possessions and spent roughly seven years living as nomads in the remote wilderness of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. They slept in tents or basic shelters, cooked over fires, foraged, and hunted, where Miriam learned with bow and arrow, later using a rifle. She has described the experience as transformative for body and mind.
She became an author. Her first memoir, Woman in the Wilderness, was an international bestseller. Later books include Wild at Heart, Alone in the World, and Dutch titles such as Overleven in de wildernis. She has also co-edited collections of wilderness stories and appears on her YouTube channel documenting expeditions.
She has featured in TV programs, including the Dutch series Floortje naar het einde van de wereld and Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild. She continues solo treks, expeditions, including in the Himalayas, Central Asia, etc., speaking, and occasional guiding, while emphasizing self-reliance, nature connection, and resilience.
Her husband developed serious kidney issues, linked to polluted water exposure, which ended their fully nomadic tent-based life together.Since around 2021 the couple have based themselves in an off-grid shepherd’s cottage in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains, near the Greek border. Peter’s health limits his ability to travel extensively, so Miriam undertakes many solo adventures from this base while they maintain a simple, garden-focused life there with pets.