Douglas Maxwell was born in 1974 in Girvan, on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland. He is an award-winning playwright, whose work has been performed throughout Scotland, the UK and abroad. His play Variety, a comic drama about the impact of cinema on Scotland's variety entertainers, was staged at The Edinburgh International Festival in 2002 and was subsequently broadcast on BBC4. Maxwell was also the subject of a BBC2 Scotland Artworks documentary in 2002.