Duncan Sarkies was born in 1970 and attended Otago and Victoria Universities. Duncan is a graduate of the Roger Hall playwriting course at Otago University.
A playwright, screenwriter and stand-up comic as well as a fiction writer, he won the Bruce Mason playwriting award in 1995 and the Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary in 1998. His play Saving Grace was filmed in 1997. His first book was the award-winning Stray Thoughts and Nose Bleeds (VUP, 1999), a collection of prose pieces, and with his brother Robert he co-wrote the scripts for the highly successful films Scarfies (1999) and Two Little Boys (2012) adapted from Duncan's novel of the same name.
Duncan has written for the television series Flight of the Conchords. In 2013 his novel Demolition of the Century was published by Penguin. His third novel, Star Gazers, was published in 2025.
Duncan Sarkies was one of two recipients of the 2015 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship, shared with fellow writer Bob Glancy.