Anthony Ivan Holden (22 May 1947 – 7 October 2023) was an English writer, broadcaster and literary critic, particularly known as a biographer of artists including Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, the essayist Leigh Hunt, the opera librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and the actor Laurence Olivier, and of members of the British royal family, notably Charles, Prince of Wales.
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.
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.
[6] Holden was a member of the Board of Governors of the South Bank Centre 2002–08, during the landmark renovation programme under the chairmanship of Lord Hollick.
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.
[11] In 2005, he appeared on the chat show Heads Up with Richard Herring to discuss his life, career and his love of poker.
In 2007, Holden published Bigger Deal: A Year Inside the Poker Boom (ISBN 0-7432-9482-3), a journal of his second stint as a professional player, between the 2005 and 2006 WSOP events.