The son of Thomas Holroyd and Edith (King) Holroyd, Stuart Holroyd attended University College London (1957-58) but left without completing his degree.

He published his first book, Emergence from Chaos, in 1957 at the age of twenty-three. The same publisher, Victor Gollancz, had recently published The Outsider, the first book by Holroyd's friend Colin Wilson. Wilson and Holroyd, along with the novelist Bill Hopkins, were associated with the literary movement known as the Angry Young Men. In the same year, Holroyd, Wilson and Hopkins each contributed an essay to Declaration - an anthology of statements by writers and artists then labelled, rightly or wrongly, as Angry Young Men (the contributors included not only John Osborne and Kingsley Amis but Doris Lessing and the director Lindsay Anderson). In 1958, Holroyd's play, The Tenth Chance was produced at the Royal Court Theater; disturbances in the audience during the single performance, and a subsequent confrontation in a nearby public house involving Kenneth Tynan, Christopher Logue and Colin Wilson were widely reported.

Emergence from Chaos was a literary/psychological study of several modern poets. Holroyd's next book, Flight and Pursuit (1959) was an autobiographical examination of the author's search for "spiritual values".

In 1961, Holroyd married Susan Joy Bennett. With the exception of a textbook on English literature (The English Imagination), Holroyd did not publish another book for sixteen years. Contraries; A Personal Progression, which appeared in 1975, was a memoir of the "angry" years of the late 1950s, containing portraits of Wilson and Hopkins.

Holroyd has since turned his attention to different subjects, writing a series of books on the paranormal, parapsychology, encounters with extraterrestrial life, gnosticism and the philosophy of Krishnamurthi.

Books

• Emergence from Chaos (1957)
• Flight and Pursuit (1959)
• The English Imagination (1969)
• A Personal Progression (1975)
• Dream Worlds (1976)
• PSI and the Conscious Explosion (1977)
• Alien Intelligence (1979)
• Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth (1979)
• With Susan Holroyd The Complete Book of Sexual Love (1979)
• Quest of the Quier Mind (1980)
• The Man, the Mystery & the Message (1991)
• The Elements of Gnosticism (ISBN 1-86204-146-6 Element Books Ltd. 1994)

Play

• The Tenth Chance (1958)

Critical essay

• "A Sense of Crisis" in Declaration (Edited by Tom Maschler, MacGibbon & Kee, 1957)