Magee was born in May 1990 in a republican family and grew up in Poleglass, on the edge of west Belfast.
[1] Magee's first novel, Close to Home (2023), won the 2023 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature,[3] was category winner for debut fiction in the 2023 Nero Book Awards,[4] was the Waterstones Irish Book of the Year,[5] and winner of the John McGahern Prize.
[6] The Guardian's reviewer described it as "a staggeringly humane and tender evocation of class, violence and the challenge of belonging in a world that seems designed to keep you watching from the sidelines.
",[7] and a representative of Waterstones said that it was "the unanimous choice for Irish Book of the Year by all the booksellers in Ireland, north and south".
[9][10][11] He is the fiction editor of The Tangerine, a Belfast literary magazine,[1][12] and was one of the team which launched it in 2016.