Taylor Holden

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Taylor Holden, (b London 1960), who is better known as Wendy Holden, is a former journalist and experienced author with sixteen non-fiction books to her credit. Her first novel, The Sense of Paper, was published in September 2006.

A reporter for eighteen years, the last ten of which were spent writing for the London Daily Telegraph, she has – as Wendy Holden - covered news events at home and abroad, including the Gulf War, the Iran/Iraq War, as well as conflicts throughout the Middle East, Communist Europe and Northern Ireland.

Her non-fiction titles have chiefly been ghosted autobiographies of remarkable women, many with wartime experiences, such as the international bestseller Tomorrow to the Brave, the story of the only woman in the French Foreign Legion during World War II; Behind Enemy Lines, about a young Jewish woman who repeatedly crossed German lines as a spy; and Till the Sun Grows Cold, the bestselling memoir of a British mother whose daughter married a Sudanese warlord before being killed. She has also written A Lotus Grows in the Mud, the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling autobiography of actress Goldie Hawn, Memories Are Made of This, a biography of Dean Martin as seen through his daughter’s eyes, and has two other major titles in the publishing pipeline.

Her work has been serialised in national newspapers and magazines around the globe, selected for audio extracts on BBC Radio, used in schools and colleges as educational tools, and transferred to both commercial television and radio drama. She has written her first screenplay, and is an occasional editor with The Writer’s Workshop, a leading British literary consultancy.

Other works have included Central 822, the autobiography of a pioneering policewoman at Scotland Yard, (serialised on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour); Biting the Bullet, the remarkable life story of an SAS wife (serialised in The Sun newspaper); Footprints in the Snow, the story of a paraplegic who had a revolutionary implant in her spine (made into a TV drama starring Caroline Quentin and Kevin Whateley), plus the bestselling novelisations of the films The Full Monty and Waking Ned, as well as Shell Shock, a searing investigation into the trauma of conflict from the World War One to the Gulf War, and Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, a highly controversial book, banned in Ireland, on the Irish abortion case.

The Sense of Paper is her first novel. She lives in Suffolk, England, with her husband and four dogs. Her second novel, The Language of Glass, is expected to be published in 2008. See www.taylorholden.co.uk