Douglas Kennedy was born in Manhattan in 1955. His father was a commodities broker and his mother worked at NBC. He was educated at The Collegiate School and graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1976. He also spent a year studying at Trinity College Dublin.

"I was a history major," Kennedy explained. "Retrospectively, I think the history major provides much better training for a novelist. So much of what I do in my own fiction is observational, is looking at behavior. By studying human history you really see how human folly endlessly repeats itself. In my work...in whatever form it takes...I am very much grappling with what it means to be American in this way."

In 1977, he returned to Dublin and started a co-operative theatre company with a friend. This led him to being hired to run the Abbey Theatre's second house, The Peacock. At the age of 28, he resigned from The Peacock to write full time. After several radio plays for the BBC and one stage play - Send Lawyers, Guns and Money, premiered at the Peacock in 1986 - he decided to switch direction and wrote a narrative travel book, Beyond the Pyramids.

This appeared in 1988, the same year that he and his ex wife moved to London. Two more non-fiction titles and a novel, The Dead Heart, followed. Then, in 1997, The Big Picture was published to international acclaim. His subsequent novels include The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship,State of the Union. The Woman in the Fifth and Leaving The World. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages. In April 2007, he was awarded the French decoration, the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In November of 2009 he received the first 'Grand Prix du Figaro', awarded by the newspaper 'Le Figaro'. He has two children, Max and Amelia. He divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin and Maine.

His novel The Dead Heart was the basis of the 1997 film Welcome to Woop Woop. A French film version of his novel, The Big Picture, will be released in 2010, starring Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve, under the title: L'Homme Qui Voulait Vivre Sa Vie. Already published to huge acclaim in Europe - where it was a number one bestseller in France earlier this year - "Leaving the World" will be published in the United States by Atria (a division of Simon and Schuster) in June 2010.

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