Anthony Ivan Holden was born in Southport, Lancashire, and educated at Oundle School and Merton College, Oxford, where he read English language and literature, edited the student magazine Isis and appeared on University Challenge. A journalist before turning full-time writer, at the start of his career 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 book on the case, The St. Albans Poisoner, was filmed as The Young Poisoner's Handbook. Named Young Journalist of the Year in 1972, he was on the staff of The Sunday Times, 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, Assistant Editor of The Times, Executive Editor, Today,, and chief classical music critic of The Observer. 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. In May 2015 he gave the annual A.E. Housman lecture on the Name and Nature of Poetry at the Hay-on-Wye Festival. He has also made frequent appearances on television, presenting such documentaries as Charles at Forty, Anthony Holden on Poker and Who Killed Tchaikovsky?. In the mid-1980s he presented a weekly BBC Radio 4 chat show, In the Air. Holden's papers are collected at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. He is a dedicated Arsenal fan and has a season ticket to the Emirates. Holden's maternal grandfather was Ivan Sharpe, the England international footballer and Olympic gold medallist who later became a celebrated sports writer. He has been married twice, and has three sons and four grandchildren.
Poker
Holden is a keen poker player, and spent a year playing professionally while researching his 1990 book , which has been praised by poker enthusiasts from David Mamet and Salman Rushdie to Walter Matthau and is frequently described as a 'cult classic'. The book covers his experiences between the World Series of Pokertournaments in 1988 and 1989. In 2007, Holden published Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom, a journal of his second stint as a professional player, between the 2005 and 2006 WSOP events. In 2000 he won TV's first Celebrity Late Night Poker on Channel 4, beating Al Alvarez, Martin Amis, Victoria Coren, Ricky Gervais, Patrick Marber and Stephen Fry. In 2005 he appeared on the chat show Heads Up with Richard Herring to discuss his life, career and his love of poker. In 2006 he represented England in TV's World Cup of Poker, staged by PokerStars, for whom he was a sponsored player 2006–2008. In 2009 he was elected the first President of the International Federation of Poker at its founding congress in Lausanne, Switzerland. After four years in office, he resigned in April 2013.
