Wendy Holden's Podcast

A fascinating and timely interview from 10 years ago to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII and the liberation of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors. Next week, on the 80th anniversary, Wendy Holden, Mark Olsky, plus the two other miracles babies Hana Moran and Eva Clarke will, with Paul Kosiek, revisit Mauthausen concentration camp and remember those who didn't make it.

I write books. Lots of books. I tell peopl...

Bestselling author and historian Wendy Holden explains what led her to write a novel inspired by the incredible true story of Fredy Hirsch, a young man who persuaded the Nazis to allow him to set up a Children's Block in the shadow of Auschwitz's hungry chimneys. Young, gay, German and Jewish, Fredy set aside his own needs and risked his life every day to offer thousands of children guidance, protection, and love. Inside ...

In July 2021, Wendy was invited to the postponed Ways with Words Literary Festival at Dartington Hall in Devon to speak about her friendship and working relationship with the 100-year-old war veteran Captain Tom, who raised almost £40m for the NHS during the pandemic lockdown. This is the 50-minute audio recording of the video of that event, minus the first few minutes due to a technical fault. We hope you like it.

I write books. Lo...

This exclusive interview with the brilliant Phil Williams on the award winning Times Radio aired on March 31. In it, Wendy and Phil talk about Tom's legacy work - Life Lessons - published April 2 to follow on from his bestselling autobiography Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day. Tom sadly died of Covid two months earlier on February 2, aged 100. Life Lessons, written in his own words before he died, is his parting gift to the world.

I...

In this acclaimed first novel by author and former journalist Wendy Holden, Charlie, a war correspondent turned author who is haunted by her worst journalistic experiences, turns to the history of paper and the materials of JMW Turner to distract her from the ghosts of her past. Her research brings her into contact with Alan, a highly successful artist and Turner scholar. She falls under his seductive spell, only to discover that A...

This is the audio only of a video presentation that aired at the end of 2020 featuring Edna Adam Ismail, the 'Muslim Mother Teresa' whose life of selfless devotion is soon to be a film. Her autobiography,  A Woman of Firsts, published by Harper Collins, broke new ground. Here is some more information about it----

Imprisonment. Mutilation. Persecution. Edna Adan Ismail endured it all – for the women of Africa. 

Edn...

A beautiful glassmaker. Two damaged men who love her. Set in exotic Bohemia and the wilderness of an English coast, this is a story of obsession and passion and fear…
 
Wendy Holden explains where she found the unlikely inspiration for her latest novel, The Cruelty of Beauty, set in pre-revolution Czechoslovakia and Norfolk. 'A seed had been planted in my writer’s imagination - the nucleus of a yellow-green flower that...

Thirty years after she first heard his voice singing to her from a jukebox at her local drive-in, Barbara Ann Blakely began her love affair with Frank Sinatra. After a tempestuous courtship, she finally heard him say the wedding vows that began his fourth, final, and most enduring marriage; one that would last more than two decades until the end of his life. Generous and jealous, witty and wicked, Frank comes alive in this poignant...

Imprisonment. Mutilation. Persecution. Edna Adan Ismail endured it all – for the women of Africa.

Edna saw first-hand how poor healthcare, lack of education and ancient superstitions had devastating effects on Somaliland’s people, especially its women. When she suffered the trauma of FGM herself as a young girl at the bidding of her mother, Edna’s determination was set.

The first midwife to practise in Somaliland, Edna became a formi...

Young musician Zuzana Ruzickova was just eighteen years old when, after almost six years of imprisonment and slave labour under Nazi rule, she and her mother were liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British. The date was April 15, 1945, seventy-five years ago today, and they very nearly didn't make it. In her memoir One Hundred Miracles, published in paperback by Bloomsbury on May 14 and available for pre-order now, she descri...

Bestselling author Wendy Holden, in coronavirus lockdown at her home in Suffolk, is remaining philosophical about a forthcoming milestone in her writing career that has been badly affected by the pandemic. With the PR campaigns for three new books coming out in less than two weeks all but scuppered, she is drawing inspiration from the remarkable women she writes about.

For more information, see www.wendyholden.com

Wendy Holden talks about another of her books, Shell Shock, an exhaustive historical record drawn from the WWI case histories and painful testimony of numerous veterans and their doctors. Individuals tell of events that pushed them to the brink of human endurance. Shell Shock also relates the history of military psychiatry and the dilemma of those entrusted to balance the demands to ‘cure’ soldiers and return them to battle with th...

Susan Travers was a frail old lady living in a nursing home in Paris when I met her to ask about her remarkable time in the Second World War. What she told me was astonishing and unique. It formed the basis of her memoir, Tomorrow to be Brave, which was subsequently published in twelve countries and is soon to be a film.

Here is an Amazon link to the book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tomorrow-Be-Brave-Memoir-Foreign/dp/074320...