Douglas Kennedy was born in Manhattan in 1955. He was raised in the vicinity of Gramercy Park before his family emigrated north to the Upper West Side. He spent his childhood caught between feuding parents and quickly learnt self-reliance, spending a lot of time visiting the galleries of New York and developing a taste for books, art and music – his escape from the realities of home life.

These early years were to define his desire to become a writer. He attended the Collegiate School - New York's oldest school - and Bowdoin College in Maine before moving to Dublin in 1974 to study for a year at Trinity College. He returned to New York in 1976 and spent several wildly unsuccessful months working as a stage manager at a variety of off-off-Broadway theatres. In March 1977, while "in between jobs", he decided to spend a couple of weeks visiting friends in Dublin.

It was a turning point in his life.

Within a few days of returning to Dublin in the spring of 1977, Douglas helped co-found a theatre company - Stage One - which began its initial season that summer. Eighteen months later - after the third Stage One season - he joined the National Theatre of Ireland (the Abbey Theatre) as administrator of its experimental theatre, The Peacock.

During his five years at The Peacock (1978-83), he also started to write at night. He sold his first play, "Shakespeare on a Five Dollars A Day" - to BBC Radio 4 in 1980. It also received productions by RTE in Ireland and the ABC in Australia. This was followed by two other radio plays with similarly far-too-clever titles: "Floating Down the Nile on the Oxford English Dictionary" and "The Don Giovanni Blues", both broadcast on Radio 4.

In the summer of 1983, Douglas resigned his position at The Peacock to write full-time. To pay the rent, he began to freelance as a journalist, initially writing for most of the major Irish newspapers, including the Irish Times, for which he wrote a column between 1984-6. In 1986, his first stage play - "Send Lawyers, Guns and Money" - opened at The Peacock to disastrous reviews and bad box office. It is still remembered as one of the biggest flops in the 100-year history of Ireland's National Theatre. Shortly thereafter, his column was dropped by the Irish Times - and he decided that his years in Dublin were drawing to a close.

In March 1988, Douglas moved to London. The same month, his first book - Beyond the Pyramids - was published by Unwin Hyman. He also began to write for The Listener, New Statesman, and The Sunday Times. A second travel book, In God's Country, was published in July 1989, followed by Chasing Mammon - published by Harper Collins in 1992. All three books were critically acclaimed but he continued his work as a freelance contributing to The Times, The Independent, Sunday Telegraph, Arena, and GQ.

In 1994, his first novel, The Dead Heart, was published by Little Brown. The film rights were bought by Scala Productions and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and the subsequent film, “Welcome to Woop Woop”, was released in 1997, directed by Stephan Elliot ("Priscilla, Queen of the Desert").

The Big Picture, Douglas’s second novel, was an international success story. Its American publication rights sold for a seven-figure sum. Upon publication, it became a national best seller in the United States and was translated into 22 languages. It also won the 1997 WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award and was named as one of the Books of the Year in 1998 by the prestigious French literary magazine, “Lire". To date, it has sold over three million copies worldwide. The Big Picture was filmed in France as ‘L’Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie’, directed by Eric Lartigau and starring Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve.

Kennedy’s fourth novel, The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) marked a radical departure from his previous psychological thrillers and one that has been his hallmark ever since. A great tragic love story, narrated by two women, and set amidst the post-war optimism of New York in the 1940s and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy witch hunts, The Pursuit of Happiness revealed Kennedy’s unique ability to write about the intricacies of family set against the broad-sweeping epic nature of history. Published by Hutchinson to critical and commercial acclaim, it has been translated into fifteen languages and was short listed for France's prestigious "Prix des Lectrices". The book was a Top 10 Sunday Times bestseller and a No. 1 bestseller in Ireland for 4 weeks and has, to date, sold over two million copies.

Kennedy’s subsequent acclaimed novels include: A Special Relationship (2004), State of the Union (2006), The Woman in the Fifth (2007), Temptation (2008), Leaving the World (2009), The Moment (2011), Five Days (2014), and The Heat of Betrayal (2016).

He has sold over fifteen million copies worldwide.

Renowned in France as an iconic writer, Douglas has sold over 8 million copies of his books there alone and is a fluent French speaker. In 2007, he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2009, the inaugural Grand Prix de Figaro.  

He has also published a book of philosophy, All the Big Questions... With No Answers (‘Toutes ces grandes questions sans réponse’) and his first children’s book - Aurore’s Amazing Adventures (a collaboration with the acclaimed French illustrator Joann Sfar) was published in France in Spring 2019 with the rest of the world to follow. His original screenplay, Sous Le Vernis, will begin filming in France and Switzerland in 2021.