Brian Keenan was born in Belfast in 1950.  He has degrees in English and Anglo-Irish Literature and worked as a teacher and in community development before going to Beirut to teach at the University.  In 1986 he became headline news when he was captured  and held hostage in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years.  Following his release he wrote the bestselling account of his imprisonment, An Evil Cradling, which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Non-Fiction,  the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize and the Time-Life P.E.N. Award.

His second book, Between Extremes, which he co-wrote with fellow hostage John McCarthy, about their trip to Chile was also  a best seller.  His first novel, Turlough, about the legendary blind harper, Turlough O’Carolan, was published in 2000 to wide critical acclaim. Four Quarters of Light  about his travels in Alaska was published in 2005 and in USA in 2006. He memoir about his early life in Belfast will be published this autumn. He lives near Dublin with his wife and two children.