While living in Bristol he began travelling around schools in Britain as a workshop leader and later joined Bath Spa University to teach Creative Studies.

Gross won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2009 for a collection of poems, The Water Table,[1] a Gregory Award in 1981, and the National Poetry Competition in 1982.

Meanwhile I Spy Pinhole Eye, from Cinnamon Press, with photographs by Simon Denison, won him the Wales Book of the Year prize on 30 June 2010.

Gross's ten novels for young people include Going For Stone, The Lastling and The Storm Garden (Oxford University Press).

He has also written stage plays, work for radio, a children's opera, and in 2015 The King In The Car Park, a schools cantata on the death and reburial of Richard III, to a score by Benjamin Frank Vaughan).

He contributed to The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions, edited by Richard Marggraf Turley[4] and with "Halfway-to-Whole Things: Ecologies of Writing and Collaboration" to Extending Ecocriticism.