Tom Holland

Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster. He is the author of Rubicon, 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; Dynasty, a portrait of Rome's first imperial dynasty and Dominion, exploring why Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world. His most recent book, Pax, about the heyday of the Roman Empire, came out this summer.

Holland has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. His translation of Herodotus was published in 2013 by Penguin Classics, and his translation of Suetonius will come out next year, also published 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. His first children’s book, The Wolf Girl, the Greeks and the Gods, came out this spring.
 
Holland is co-presenter of the podcast The Rest is History, the world’s biggest history podcast.  He has written and presented several TV documentaries, for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from ISIS to dinosaurs.
 
He is a trustee of the British Library, and has been described in The Times as “a leading English cricketer.”