Rubicon won the 2004 Hessell-Tiltman Prize, awarded to the best work of non-fiction of historical content. It was called "gripping and hugely entertaining" by The Sunday Times, "informative, balanced and accessible" by BookPage, and "a model of exactly how a popular history of the classical world should be written" by The Guardian. His first book of history, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, was published in 2003 and garnered positive reviews. He gave up writing fiction and turned to writing history. I was doing vampire books at the time and it never crossed my mind to write history–but I was finding that my real interests were welling up, and the vampire books were really historical novels, and that I was much less interested in the fiction than in the research. I had a sense that antiquity was almost like a science fiction world, that it was utterly remote and yet eerily like our own. From that moment I started re-immersing myself in that world. While doing research for The Bone Hunter, Holland read From Alexander to Actium by historian Peter Green and his childhood passion for ancient history and civilisations was reignited.Īll my old fascination with antiquity just went Whoosh! up again. The Bone Hunter (1999) is a thriller, set in the United States, about the rivalry between two 19th-century paleontologists around whom people begin dying. Holland's last novel to date departed from the supernatural genre.
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1999's Sleeper in the Sands is set in Egypt, starting with the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and travelling backward in time as a deadly secret is unveiled. He set 1997's Deliver Us From Evil in 17th-century England, with a man named Faustus leading an army of the undead. In Attis (1996), he took historical figures from the ancient Roman Republic like Pompey and the poet Catullus and put them in a modern setting among a string of brutal murders. Holland stayed with the supernatural horror genre for his next few books, continuing to use his knowledge of ancient cultures and settings.
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The Los Angeles Times called it "a good vampire yarn-elevated and elegant enough to make you feel you needn't conceal it behind the dust jacket of some self-help work, yet happily gory and perilous" although they felt "the newly plowed plot ground is sometimes hurried through as if to get to the scholarly stuff, where the author feels perhaps on more solid ground." Its sequel, Supping with Panthers, was published in 1996 (it was also re-titled for the U.S. It was re-titled Lord of the Dead: The Secret History of Byron for the 1996 U.S. His first novel, The Vampyre: Being the True Pilgrimage of George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron (1995), drew on his knowledge of Lord Byron from his university studies and recast the 19th-century poet as a vampire. Holland's first books were Gothic horror novels about vampires, set in various time periods throughout history. He began working on a doctoral dissertation on Lord Byron, at Oxford University, but soon quit after deciding that he was "fed up with universities and fed up with being poor" and instead began working. He then went on to Queens' College, Cambridge, graduating with a 'Double First' (first-class honours in both parts I and II of the course of study in the English Tripos). Holland attended Chafyn Grove preparatory school and the independent Canford School in Dorset.
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There's a splendour and a terror about them that appealed to me – and that kind of emotional attachment is something that stays with you."
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He has said that his two passions as a child were dinosaurs and ancient civilizations: "I had the classic small boy's fascination with dinosaurs – because they're glamorous, dangerous and extinct – and essentially the appeal of the empires of antiquity is much the same. His younger brother James Holland is also an author whose focus is World War II. Holland was born in Oxfordshire and brought up in the village of Broad Chalke near Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, the elder of two sons.