[1] In addition to his 2020 win, he has been twice longlisted (for The Knife That Killed Me in 2008 and Brock in 2014) and once shortlisted (for Rook in 2018) for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, and is the winner of the 2006 Booktrust Teenage Prize for Henry Tumour.

"[2] His time at Corpus Christi had a profound influence on him and features prominently as inspiration in his books for young people: "I keep focusing on my school in my work because that's when stuff happened in my head.

And I wanted to make kids and their social networks the focus of all my books...But also my memories of school are seared into my mind, and they are the stuff that fiction is made of: conflict and love and hate.

"[10] McGowan went on to win the 2006 Booktrust Teenage Prize with his next young adult book, Henry Tumour,[11] about a boy whose brain tumor won't stop talking to him.

For one thing, it's funny – grimly, hilariously so...Original, smart and gripping, Henry Tumour breaks all kinds of rules, and does it with irresistible brio.

[3] McGowan's 2013 book Hello Darkness looked at mental illness through the story of a teenage boy accused of killing school pets.

But writing for Barrington Stoke made me focus on the bare bones of what makes us want to read: on character (above all), on the story, on the setting.

He continued writing for Barrington Stoke with four novellas in The Truth of Things series about northern working-class brothers Nicky and Kenny, the older of whom is learning disabled, who deal with a troubled home life and other challenges.

Brock was long-listed and Rook shortlisted for the Carnegie medal[17] and in 2020, Lark won the prize with the tale of Nicky and Kenny's battle for survival after a hike on the North Yorkshire Moors takes a dangerous turn.

Nicolette Jones wrote of it, "It is funny, scatological, terrifying, heartwarming and heartbreaking, and is written in everyday prose through teenage Nicky's convincing voice.

McGowan creates characters whose background (working-class northern) is too little represented in fiction for young people, and he makes us know them and live their experience as if we were there.

"[19]McGowan collaborated with author Joanna Nadin on the book Everybody Hurts (2017), a love story between two teenagers of different social classes.

The first book, The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Faceoff, was reviewed in The Telegraph by Dinah Hall, who wrote "There's a fine line between crude and funny, and McGowan treads it expertly.

McGowan penned approximately twenty of the titles in the series, which contains continuous adventure stories with a single set of main characters to take readers through the primary school years.

[23] In 2011, he wrote The Donut Diaries, the first book in a trilogy which are credited to the main character, Dermot Milligan, an overweight boy threatened with being sent to Camp Fatso.

In 2011, it was announced that McGowan had been contracted to write four books that would revive the classic children's wildlife adventure series penned between 1949 and 1980 by the late Willard Price.

The Art of Failing: Notes from the Underdog consisted of a series of essays from the course of one year in his life, each depicting some humorously embarrassing or bewildering event[27] He wrote about neighborhood adventures with his Maltese dog, Monty, and the daily idiosyncrasies of parenthood and marriage.

Kirkus Reviews said of it: "the author's delight in unearthing the overlooked pain points of everyday life and laughing at them makes up for the fractured, willy-nilly nature of the narrative.