About

Kevin O'Connell is a native of New York City, the descendant of a young officer of what had—from 1690 to 1792—been the Irish Brigade of the French army, believed to have arrived in French Canada following the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette in October of 1793. At least one grandson subsequently returned to Ireland and Mr. O'Connell's own grandparents came to New York in the early twentieth century. He holds both Irish and American citizenship.

O'Connell is the author of the Derrynane Saga, slated to be a series of four works of historical fiction, of which Beyond Derrynane (2016), Two Journeys Home (2017) and Bittersweet Tapestry (2019) are in global distribution.

He is a graduate of Don Bosco Preparatory School, Ramsey, New Jersey; Providence College and Georgetown University Law Centre.

For much of his four decades-plus long legal career, O'Connell practiced international business transactional law, primarily involving direct-investment matters, throughout Asia (principally China), Europe, and the Middle East.

Mr. O’Connell has been a serious student of selected (including the Eighteenth Century) periods of the history of Ireland for virtually all of his life; one significant aspect of this has been a continuing scholarly as well as personal interest in the extended O’Connell family (Daniel O’Connell wrote of there being a number of “outcroppings of the O’Connells" at Derrynane.), many even distant and long-ago members of which, especially the characters about whom he writes, he has “known” intimately since childhood.

The father of five children and grandfather of ten, he and his wife, Laurette, live with their golden retriever, Katie, near Annapolis, Maryland, USA.

Other Works

  • Two Journeys Home: A Novel of Eighteenth Century Europe

    2017
  • Beyond Derrynane: A Novel of Eighteenth Century Europe

    2016