凯斯·唐纳胡出生于一个爱尔兰裔的美国家庭，在七个孩子中排行第四，从小就觉得自己可能是个换生灵。他的第一个工作是美国艺术基金会担任讲稿撰写人，在长达八年的工作中，凯斯·唐纳胡利用课余时间获得文学博士学位。

1974年他立志以写作为业，并花七年时间写下了处女作《失窃的孩子》。

Inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, "The Stolen Child" is a modern fairy tale narrated by the child Henry Day and his double.""On a summer night, Henry Day runs away from home and hides in a hollow tree. There he is taken by the changelings--an unaging tribe of wild children who live in darkness and in secret. They spirit him away, name him Aniday, and make him one of their own. Stuck forever as a child, Aniday grows in spirit, struggling to remember the life and family he left behind. He also seeks to understand and fit in this shadow land, as modern life encroaches upon both myth and nature. In his place, the changelings leave a double, a boy who steals Henry's life in the world. This new Henry Day must adjust to a modern culture while hiding his true identity from the Day family. But he can't hide his extraordinary talent for the piano (a skill the true Henry never displayed), and his dazzling performances prompt his father to suspect that the son he has raised is an imposter. As he ages the new Henry Day becomes haunted by vague but persistent memories of life in another time and place, of a German piano teacher and his prodigy. Of a time when he, too, had been a stolen child. Both Henry and Aniday obsessively search for who they once were before they changed places in the world. "The Stolen Child" is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search for identity. With just the right mix of fantasy and realism, Keith Donohue has created a bedtime story for adults and a literary fable of remarkable depth and strange delights.