Anthony Holden (born 22 May 1947) is an English writer, broadcaster and 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. He has also published translations of opera and Ancient Greek poetry, as well as several autobiographical books about poker. In 2009, he was elected the first President of the International Federation of Poker (IFP). Life 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 (1974), was filmed as The Young Poisoner's Handbook (1995). 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 (1981–82), Executive Editor, Today, (1985–86), and chief classical music critic of The Observer (2002–08). 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 2002–08, 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 (ITV, 1988), Anthony Holden