Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster. He is the author of Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire, his history of the Graeco-Persian wars, won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, a panoramic account of the two centuries on either side of the apocalyptic year 1000; In the Shadow of the Sword, which covers the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Near East, and the emergence of Islam; and Dynasty, a portrait of Rome’s first imperial dynasty. Dominion, which tells the epic story of how those in the West came to be what they are, and why they think the way they do. And, Pax, the definitive history of Rome’s golden age – antiquity’s ultimate superpower at the pinnacle of its greatness. He has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. His translation of Herodotus was published in 2013 by Penguin Classics. His biography of Æthelstan, the first King of England, was published in 2016 under the Penguin Monarchs series, and his biography of Æthelflæd, England’s Forgotten Founder, was a Ladybird Expert Book published in 2019. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to ‘the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome’.

 

Holland is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History. He has written and presented a number of TV documentaries, for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from ISIS to dinosaurs. He is also co-presenter of the top 10 podcast, The Rest is History.

 

He served two years as the Chair of the Society of Authors and is Chair of the British Library’s PLR Advisory Committee.