Kate Thompson is an Irish actress and romantic novelist who also writes as Pixie Pirelli. She was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and studied English and French at Trinity College, Dublin. She spent many years as an actress in theatre and television, most notably in the Irish drama serial Glenroe. She married the actor Malcolm Douglas in 1985 and has a daughter Clara. In 1989 she won the Best Actress Award in the Dublin Theatre Festival. Her first novel, It Means Mischief, published in 1999, became a bestseller. The Blue Hour was shortlisted for the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year. Her light-hearted novels feature a group of characters involved in the arts and business, living between the South of France and Connemara, whose bittersweet romances and working lives have grown and matured through the Celtic Tiger years and the successive austerity, as the characters faced the varying challenges of wealth and poverty. Love Lies Bleeding is remarkable in that the first 25 chapters are available free by e-mail and the final part of the book, The Clandestine Chapters, can be purchased bound with silk and printed on home-made paper. 

January 1st, 1959 in Belfast (Age 65)