Richard Milward is an English writer born in Middlesbrough, in 1984. His debut novel Apples was published by Faber and Faber in 2007. He has also recently published his 2nd novel Ten Storey Love Song.
He was raised and schooled in Guisborough, Redcar and Cleveland and studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He cites Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh as the book that made him want to write and Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan and Hunter S. Thompson as his main influences. As with fellow Teesside-raised writer Michael Smith, he wrote a column for Dazed & Confused magazine.
Milward's debut novel is an account of teenage life on a Middlesbrough housing estate. It is narrated in the first person by several characters (including a butterfly), but mainly by Adam and Eve, two school students. Adam is a shy, ungainly youth with an obsessive compulsive disorder, a love of The Beatles, and a violent father. He believes himself to be in love with Eve, who is an attractive and promiscuous hard-drinker, shoplifter and drug abuser.