[1] Raised in Guisborough, (Redcar and Cleveland), Milward attended Laurence Jackson School and Prior Pursglove College.
Milward cites Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh as the book that made him want to write and Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan and Hunter S. Thompson as influences.
Milward's 2023 novel Man-Eating Typewriter is notable for its extensive use of Polari, a form of slang commonly used by the gay community in England until the late 1960s.
Boyd Tonkin of Financial Times called the novel "a mind-bending performance that unspools in flavoursome Polari"[3] In The Guardian, Neil Bartlett wrote that Milward "produced that rarest of all things on the modern fiction bookshelf: a genuinely exhilarating entertainment.
The linguistic invention borders on the dazzling, the potted social history drops its names with wit and verve, and the whole thing is both laugh-out-loud funny and authentically disgusting.