Wendy Holden (author, born 1961)
Wendy Holden
Wendy Holden, also known as Taylor Holden, is an experienced author with more than twenty-five books to her credit, nine of them international bestsellers. She is sometimes confused with the chick-lit writer of the same name. A journalist for eighteen years, the last ten of which were spent writing for the London Daily Telegraph, Wendy covered news events at home and abroad, including the Gulf War, the Iran/Iraq War, conflicts throughout the Middle East, Europe and Northern Ireland.
Writing career
Born in Pinner, North London, she began writing books in 1992 and her ghosted autobiographies, sixteen to date, chronicle the lives of such remarkable subjects as a diminutive Jewish spy in Behind Enemy Lines, and the only woman in the French Foreign Legion during WWII in Tomorrow to Be Brave which has been optioned for a film. Lady Blue Eyes, her 2011 memoir of Frank Sinatra’s widow Barbara, is a New York Times bestseller, following in the footsteps of her 2005 autobiography of Goldie Hawn, A lotus grows in the Mud, the international bestseller Till the Sun Grows Cold, a mother’s account of her daughter’s life and death in war-torn Sudan, and Heaven and Hell, the explosive memoir of Don Felder, former lead guitarist with The Eagles.
Wendy recently wrote Kill Switch, an account of a former British soldier wrongly jailed in Afghanistan. Other works have included Shell Shock: The Psychological Trauma of War, which accompanied a four-part television documentary, and the novelisation of the film The Full Monty, which became an international bestseller in nine languages and was published as a classroom aide. Memories Are Made of This, her biography of Dean Martin as seen through his daughter’s eyes is still in print eight years after publication. Footprints in the Snow, the story of a courageous paraplegic, was made into a television film starring Caroline Quentin and Kevin Whately. Central 822, her autobiography of one of Scotland Yard’s first ever female detectives, was serialised globally on BBC Radio, and her first book, Unlawful Carnal Knowledge about the controversial Irish abortion case, was banned across Ireland.
Her first novel The Sense of Paper, about a former war correspondent running from the ghosts of her past, was published by Random House, New York in 2006, to widespread critical acclaim. She is currently working on a new memoir, a children's book, a second novel and a screenplay, and lives in Suffolk, England, with her husband and two dogs.