about kate

Kate was determined from a young age to become an actress, because, even though she enjoyed writing (her first published poem earned her fifteen quid when she was fourteen!), she never considered it a viable career option. Because her mother very sensibly advised her that if she was going to go into the precarious acting business she’d better have a degree to fall back on, she left Belfast for Dublin to study English and French at Trinity College. Upon graduating she got her first professional gig: a BBC television play that also starred Liam Neeson. After that, her acting career took off in Ireland in both television and theatre. One memorable year was spent seducing Gabriel Byrne in the Wicklow mountains in a six-part television series. She married Malcolm Douglas - also an actor - while appearing in a production of Congreve’s Love for Love in New Jersey in 1985, and her daughter Clara arrived in 1987. There followed two and a half years of grinding poverty, when work dried up completely.

In 1989, things started to look up. Kate won the Best Actress Award in the Dublin Theatre Festival, discovered the luxury of voiceover work (earning herself the soubriquet of 'Ireland's Joanna Lumley'), and spent nine years in Glenroe, a television soap. Knowing that she was about to hit a dangerous age for an actress, and scared stiff by the vision of another stint in penury, Kate decided to try her hand at writing in 1996. She made this decision not long after one of the most magical and exhilarating events of her life - swimming with wild dolphins in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of County Mayo.

Kate’s first novel – It Means Mischief - went straight onto the bestseller list. It was followed by More Mischief, Going Down and The Blue Hour - which became a number one bestseller in Ireland and was shortlisted for the 2003 Parker Romantic Novel of the Year. Since then she has written many more novels: Striking Poses, A Perfect Life, Living the Dream, Sex, Lies & Fairytales, Love Lies Bleeding, The Kinsella Sisters, The O'Hara Affair and - most recently - That Gallagher Girl. Hard to Choos was published under the nom-de-plume Pixie Pirelli (Ms Pirelli is actually a character in Sex, Lies & Fairytales), and a short novel - Stargazing - was published as part of the Open Door Series to promote adult literacy. All Kate's novels have been widely translated, and Living the Dream, Sex, Lies & Fairytales, The Kinsella Sisters and The O'Hara Affair are available as audio books, recorded by the author. Her latest novel - That Gallagher Girl is the third in a trilogy for Avon HarperCollins, and it has just entered the top ten original fiction bestseller list in Ireland. It is the Ireland AM book club Book of the Month for February.

Kate recently returned to the acting world. After over a decade dedicated to the solitary pursuit of writing she came to realise just how much she missed the company of actors: she played the character of the flamboyant 'cougar' Justine Lennox in RTE's long-running soap opera, Fair City last year, and she has now joined the Fair City writing team as a script writer.

Kate lives some of the year in Dublin, and some of the year on the West coast of Ireland, where she swims off some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. She is happily married, and has one daughter - an adventuress called Clara. She considers herself beyond privileged to have hit upon a way of earning a living doing the thing she loves best - escaping the travails of real life through writing.

© 2011 Kate Thompson