Anthony McGowan:

A Biographical Sketch

I was born in 1965 in Manchester, the second of what were to be five children. My parents were then both nurses, although my father had begun to progress up the nursing management ladder. My mother is Irish, my father Scottish. We moved to Cottingham outside Hull and then, in 1971, to Sherburn-in-Elmet, a small town between Leeds and York, where my parents still live. My childhood was reasonably idyllic, although we were always short of cash. The family atmosphere was (and still is) richly argumentative and chaotic. I went to an entirely charming village school, and then on to the roughest Catholic comprehensive in Leeds, where even my lower-lower middle class background set me apart as something of a toff. Luckily I was tall and good at sport, which took me out of the realm of the bullied.

 I always found school work easy, and coasted to respectable “O” level grades. And then, because of an administrative mix-up, I moved schools, and ended up at Mount St Mary’s in Leeds, a former girls convent school, which had just turned comprehensive. There were supposed to be half a dozen or so boys joining the previously all-girl Sixth form, but the others all dropped out, leaving me alone with the fifty girls (there’s an amusing form photograph of this). Not ideal odds.

Up to this point I had always been destined for medicine (every nurse wants their child to be a doctor), but now I dropped my science “A” levels and changed to the arts, on the grounds that they were easier. I also decided that I would be a writer, although back then I had poetry, and dying of consumption at the age of twenty-six, in mind. I yearned for at least nine of the convent girls, but the nearest I came to a date was a slow dance with one of the nuns at the leaving disco.

Again without working too hard I did well in my “A” levels, and decided on a whim to study Philosophy and Politics at Manchester University. The university then (mid-eighties) was in a final energetic phase of political radicalism, and my time there was punctuated by riots, pickets, demos and slogans. Fun, but ultimately futile. The main issue seemed to be whether the Revolutionary Communist Party could outdo the Socialist Workers in their condemnation of the sell-out policies of Militant. I was in the Anarchist club, and generally stood aloof. I was once chucked by a girl called Sarah, because she said that I wasn’t political enough for her (although she told a friend of mine that it was really because I had a crap haircut).  I wrote a few articles for the student newspaper, and plenty of anguished journals. I had a good time, but not a great one, and wished I concentrated more on either work or hedonism, rather than the unsatisfactory middle line I took.

After graduating I stayed on to do an M.Phil, writing a thesis on the concept of genius in Western culture. It was during this time that I worked as a nightclub bouncer. Except for one incident with a gun, and a couple of fights, there was little violence in my time there.

I moved to London in 1989, taking what I assumed would be a short-lived, transitional job as a civil servant. I worked in the Customs & Excise headquarters division dealing with VAT policy in the construction industry. And yes, it was as boring and soul-destroying as it sounds.

 I was saved, in 1991, by the Open University, which offered me a teaching/research scholarship. I taught Aesthetics at the OU summer schools, and worked on a PhD on the philosophy of beauty (The Sublime machine: Conceptions of Masculine beauty 1750-1850). My life plan was now to get a job as an academic and write novels in my spare time. Sadly, despite my completed PhD, a year of applications got me precisely one interview, and no job. With dismay I found myself with little choice but to skulk back to the civil service, albeit to the slightly less technical world of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, where I wrote quasi-academic reports on education issues.

It was at the DCMS that I started writing my first completed novel, Abandon Hope, a black comedy modelled on Dante’s Inferno, and aimed at teenagers/young adults. I sent it out half completed, and agents and publishers were united in rejecting it.

While working on my PhD I met Rebecca Campbell, a fashion designer. We were married in 1997. Although not, by her own definition, a writer, she had several good ideas for novels. After the rejection of Abandon Hope, I helped her to develop one of these, and The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle was published in 2002, by HarperCollins, to glowing reviews. It has been a best-seller in the US, and has also come out in six other countries. A follow-up, Alice’s Secret Garden was published in the UK in 2003.

Galling? Extremely. My wife the fashion designer was now a much more successful writer than me. Our son, Gabriel was born in 1999 and I gave up work to become a full-time parent. I also thought I might have time to write, which was optimistic, although I did manage to complete Abandon Hope. One good consequence of Rebecca’s success was that her agent asked to see my book. She liked it and took me on. However, even her advocacy failed to convince anyone to make an offer on Abandon Hope, although this time the rejections were full of praise. Undeterred, my agent asked me to come up with some new ideas for novels, and eventually I wrote Stag Hunt, a rather grim literary thriller, which became my first published novel. I followed this up with a sequel, Mortal Coil (also published by Hodder & Stoughton).

I still hadn’t abandoned hope on Abandon Hope, and, after a quick name change to Hellbent, it was snaffled up by Random House Children’s’ Books, and published in 2005. It has been followed by Henry Tumour (2006) and The Knife that Killed Me (2008), as well as the ongoing Bare Bum Gang sequence of books for younger readers.

Over the 1990s I did various journalism jobs, including working briefly as a magazine editor, and later as a writer for a web site about death and bereavement.

In 1996 I joined a band, Dandelion Wine, set up by a friend, Tim Vass, who is fairly well known in the Indie music scene. Our album, Model Village, was critically well received and sold out its modest production run. We were offered a tour of Japan, but Tim is afraid to fly. There ended my music career.