Life
He was born in Southport, Lancashire, and educated at Oundle School and Merton College, Oxford, where he took an MA in English language and literature, edited the student magazine Isis and appeared on University Challenge. An award-winning journalist before turning full-time writer, he has written for a wide range of publications on both sides of the Atlantic. Named Young Journalist of the Year in 1972, he was on the staff of The Sunday Times (1973-79), commended in the British Press Awards in 1976 as News Reporter of the Year for his work in Northern Ireland, and winning Columnist of the Year in 1977. He was Washington Correspondent and US editor of The Observer, 1979-81, Assistant Editor of The Times, 1981-2, Executive Editor, Today, 1985-6, and chief classical music critic of The Observer from 2002-2008.
He has also made frequent appearances on television, presenting such documentaries as Charles at Forty (ITV, 1988), Anthony Holden on Poker (BBC2, 1991) and Who Killed Tchaikovsky? (Omnibus, BBC1, 1993). In the mid-1980s he presented a weekly BBC Radio 4 chat show, In the Air.
At the start of his career in journalism, as a graduate trainee on Thomson Regional Newspapers’ Hemel Hempstead Evening Post-Echo, Holden covered the trial in St Albans of the psychopathic poisoner, Graham Young. His 1974 book on the case, The St. Albans Poisoner, was filmed in 1995 as The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, starring Hugh O'Conor and Antony Sher.
In 1999-2000 he was an inaugural Fellow of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
When he was a Whitbread Prize judge in 2000 he said it would have been a "national humiliation" if Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban had won, ahead of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. He had threatened to resign if that happened. The novelist Robert Harris derided this threat as "pompous."
Holden was a member of the Board of Governors of the South Bank Centre 2002-8, during the landmark renovation programme under the chairmanship of Lord Hollick.
Since 2006 he has been a Trustee of Shakespeare North Trust.
Holden's papers are collected at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
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