Douglas Kennedy

He was subsequently offered a job at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, and it was at this point that he started to write.

At the age of 28, he resigned in order to write full-time, and his early work included several radio plays for the BBC and one stage play entitled Send Lawyers, Guns and Money. There then followed a change in direction - quite literally - as he pursued the ideal of writing a narrative travel book; Beyond the Pyramids.

Two more non-fiction titles and a novel followed. Then in the late eighties Douglas and his wife moved to London and The Big Picture was published to great international acclaim, and his subsequent best-selling novels include The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship, and State of the Union.

Here, he talks about he talks about writing, living in London, his latest book, Temptation and success. As he notes on his website; "Anyone who writes and isn't completely self-deluded knows that success - if and when it ever arrives - isn't a permanent state of affairs. Writing careers are notoriously loopy and never run according to a logical narrative plan. The boy wonder who had the thousand megawatt klieg light on him in his twenties discovers he's a burn-out in mid-life... the long-forgotten academic who has been turning out a novel every five years is suddenly elevated to the status of international eminence grise in his sixties. And in between these sorts of extremities comes the knowledge - secretly understood by any novelist - that you really can't trust success, because there's always the next book to write. And it could fail."

Temptation is priced £14.99, and is available from all good bookshops now.