A Talking Tumour

'I thought I had no chance,' he explains. 'Earlier in the year I'd got shortlisted for the Branford Boase award for Hellbent, and not only didn't win, but didn't come second. It was crushing. It was worse than not being shortlisted at all.

'I think it was like a psychological shield against that, assuming I wouldn't win. So I got drunk at the ceremony beforehand and sat at the back making sarcastic remarks when Mal was doing his speech. I was completely flabbergasted to win.'

The award rescued McGowan's career as a teenage writer from the brink of oblivion. 'Before it, Random House said they didn't want any more teenage books from me. It's made them now want more teenage books, which is what I most enjoy writing.'

Although a fairly recent phenomenon in this country compared to America, 'the teenage book' has been around long enough for sex and swearing to become commonplace in the genre and for seemingly any subject to be fair game.

Certainly, the story of Hector, the boy with the talking brain tumour, contains plenty of schoolyard violence and vulgar humour, but it is also genuinely funny, deeply romantic, and intellectually and linguistically sophisticated. Curiously, the book attracted controversy, and sales to key purchasers, such as librarians, were lost as a result.

'I was astonished that it was controversial,' says McGowan. 'It seemed to me that it was rather a nice book. It's got a nice message: be nice to each other. The thought that people could think it might be corrupting young people is astonishing given the violence all around.

'The same libraries that didn't have my books would have the Terminator films in the children's section. Why that kind of violence is okay but a kid saying "f***" when he finds out he's got a brain tumour isn't, is bizarre.

'In fact, the bad language in my books tends to be quite poetic and complex and rich language, so it's salty rather than straightforward swearing.'

'In fact, the bad language in my books tends to be quite poetic and complex and rich language, so it's salty rather than straightforward swearing. There's a lot of quite explicit body humour, but not that much F-ing and blinding.'

Once the tumour takes hold, Hector's unconscious begins to surface in the form of the amusing but often unpleasant Henry Tumour, who peppers his conversation with Shakespeare and Donne and dedicates himself to making Hector experience the fullness of life while he still can.

He convinces the uncool Hector to try his luck with the most sought after girl in school, Uma Upshaw, and advises him to steer clear of Amanda, a misfit with a portwine birthmark. Many of the school scenes are cringingly realistic, but McGowan handles the romance between Hector and Amanda with sensitivity and surprising discretion.

'I'm slightly embarrassed about delving into teenage sexuality. It feels a bit pervy to me. That sounds a bit Jane Austen!' he says. 'Teenage boys are this weird mix of this grotty side and this intense romanticism, which is what I was like and my friends were like. When you love a girl when you're 15 it has this intense purity that it almost never has later on.'

'Teenage boys are this weird mix of this grotty side and this intense romanticism, which is what I was like and my friends were like.'

His depiction of a teenage boy's inner struggles are so convincing that one can't help but suspect that Hector's voice closely resembles that of McGowan's younger self.

'Hector is basically me,' he confirms. 'He's a bit more nerdy than I was. I was sporty at school as well as being quite clever, so I wasn't bullied. But the gang is very much my gang. They were my friends.

'When I was that age I read an awful lot of quite serious literature. My friends were the same. We liked ideas, we liked to really grapple with a book. But we also liked a lot of fart jokes.'

But although he was a voracious reader in those days and still knows Swinburne by heart, he realises that many teenagers today will not be as well read as he was; indeed, so far none of them has spotted that the relationship between Hector and Henry Tumour is based on that of Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I.

'There are some things in there which are going to mystify and baffle most teenagers,' he acknowledges. 'Henry Tumour speaks Shakespearean rhyme all the way through. I was trying to make what he said understandable but also mysterious. If any teenager would want to follow up the quotes they could find them all.

'My big fear is always that the complex language is going to put teenagers off rather than the swearing suck them in. But it doesn't put them off, which is quite a fine balance to strike.

'They tend to like the philosophical ideas, the discussions; there's stuff about the meaning of death and what comes after. It's not that they're not up for an intellectual challenge, it's that they haven't read widely enough to get all the quotes.'

Surprisingly, for someone who draws so authentically on his own teenage years, McGowan had never read a teenage book until he started writing for that age group. Now, though, he's done some catching up.

Many of his favourite teenage books were written in the 1970s, when he was a child. He particularly admires Alan Garner's ambitious Red Shift. 'I read it two years ago. I wish I'd read it when I was a teenager. I think it's a masterpiece. His other books are a bit less complicated, but still difficult texts. He definitely made me raise my game. He took risks that I wasn't prepared to take until I'd read him. He makes huge demands of his readers. I thought: I'll try that!'