Douglas Kennedy

The Manhattan Writer Who Fled to Europe

Douglas Kennedy was born in New York City in 1955. His father worked in the commodities market and his mother was an assistant at NBC. But Kennedy didn't stay within the comfort zone of the American middle class. He moved to Dublin at age twenty to found a theater company, and that decision changed the way he understood storytelling.

Theater was his first school of dialogue.

He directed the Playhouse at the University of Dublin, where he learned that a scene only works if there's a secret under the table. During this period, he wrote radio plays for the BBC and started working as a travel journalist. In 1988, he published his first nonfiction book, but commercial success still eluded him.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1994, he published The Dead Heart. This noir novel set in the Australian desert caught the film industry's attention almost immediately. Stephan Elliott adapted it in 1997 under the title Welcome to Woop Woop. The film was a box office flop, but it put Kennedy's name on the radar of Los Angeles producers looking for material.

Cameras and Obsessions

His big breakthrough came with The Big Picture in 1997. The novel sold millions of copies and posed a moral dilemma that obsessed Hollywood for years. A lawyer accidentally kills his wife's lover and assumes the dead man's identity to start over. Fox paid a multimillion-dollar sum for the rights, but the project stalled in American studio offices over screenplay problems.

It was French director Eric Lartigau who brought the story to the screen in 2010. He moved the action to France and cast Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve. The film received excellent reviews and confirmed that Kennedy's stories thrive better in European cinema than in the traditional studio system.

Kennedy writes with the frame in mind.

His characters are often professionals who lose everything because of a single mistake. In 2011, director Pawel Pawlikowski brought The Woman in the Fifth to the screen, starring Ethan Hawke. The film captured the atmosphere of nightmare and disorientation that Kennedy handles so well in his writing. It was a $8 million production shot entirely in Paris.

Maturity in the European Market

France adopted him for good.

The French government awarded him the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for his contribution to culture. Kennedy divides his time between Maine, London and Paris. In 2016, he published The Blue Hour, and in 2017 he released The Great Wide Open. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and steadily attract TV adaptation options.

In 2020, he published Isabelle in the Afternoon and returned to his interest in complicated romances that end in administrative tragedy. His plots don't aim for a happy ending, because he prefers the gritty realism of legal and financial consequences. So his readers know there will always be a plunge into the abyss in his pages.

In 2023, he published the novel Et c’est ainsi que nous vivons in France. The book explores a dystopia in which the United States has split into two states at odds over ideology and religion. The French publisher Grasset handled an initial print run of 150,000 copies for the launch in the European market.