Born in England, he spent much of his childhood with his father, a psychiatrist at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital. After moving at the age of twentyone to Canada to work in at Oakridge hospital, he decided against following his father’s footsteps but instead to pursue his passion for writing. His signature style has emerged with the novel Asylum (1996), one of the greatest literary achievements of the last decades. He wrote, among other books, Spider (1990), which was the homonymous film by David Cronenberg, Martha Peake: a Novel of the Revolution (2000), winner of the Flaiano prize, and the collections of short stories Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988) and Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005). His latest work, Constance (2012), returns to investigate the little big neurosis of human existence with a clear sharp style. McGrath lives between London and New York with his wife, the British actress Maria Aitken.