He studied at St Joseph's Convent primary, King Edward V1 Grammar, Chelmsford and Canley College of Education, Coventry.
He has published four novels: The Path, about the personal, intellectual and spiritual inter-reaction between a group of international travelers on the Camino de Santiago; The Lack Brothers, a journey by three brothers in search of their mother through a mythologised London of the last fifty years, published by Transworld; Breaking Up, depicting the financial and interior collapse of a city trader as his domestic and professional life literally goes up in flames, published by Pegasus; Thistown, a political novel for teenagers set in a mythical town somewhere in the universe which is impossible to escape from and where no-one gets older.
The play achieved notoriety after it was mentioned in Parliament and the Lords after Prime Minister Thatcher demanded a copy, the Chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey publicly apologised for the content, and Mary Whitehouse, of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, issued a second apology to President Reagan on the behalf of the British people.
Most recently he adapted Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy[4] (winner New York Critics Circle award)[citation needed] and wrote an eight part cop show for BBC One.
[citation needed] McKay has written many plays for the theatre including Yellowbacks, a dystopian take on the AIDS epidemic; Harry Mixture about a South London gangster; Pistols which describes the final hours of the punk band; Renaissence, an insight into the mental collapse of a lawyer as his family breaks up around him; The People's Temple details the slow descent of the Californian cult into paranoia and mass suicide; Forgotten Voices, an adaptation of the best-selling oral history of the first world war for the Edinburgh Festival.