The Knife of Never Letting Go won numerous awards including the Booktrust Teenage Prize, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and the 2008 Tiptree Award. It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
The Ask and the Answer won the 2009 Costa Book Award in the children's book category. It, too, made the Carnegie shortlist.
Monsters of Men won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
More Than This made the Carnegie shortlist also.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here received many awards, including six starred reviews, the Michael Printz Award shortlist, and the Kirkus Best Book of the Year.
After graduating, he worked as corporate Writer for a cable company. He published his first story in Genre magazine in 1997 and was working on his first novel when he moved to London in 1999.
Ness's first novel, The Crash of Hennington, was published in 2003 and was followed soon after by his short story collection Topics About Which I Know Nothing, which was released in 2004.
Ness was naturalised a British citizen in 2005. He entered into a civil partnership with his partner in 2006, less than two months after the Civil Partnership Act came into force. In August 2013, Ness and his partner got married following the legalisation of same-sex marriage in California.
The Knife of Never Letting Go won numerous awards including the Booktrust Teenage Prize, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and the 2008 Tiptree Award. It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.
The Ask and the Answer won the 2009 Costa Book Award in the children's book category. It, too, made the Carnegie shortlist.
Monsters of Men won the CILIP Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Ness taught creative writing at Oxford University and has written and reviewed for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian. He reviews for The Guardian as of July 2012. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and was the first Writer in Residence for Booktrust.
His fourth young adult novel, More Than This, was released on 5 September 2013. It later made the Carnegie Medal shortlist of 2015.
In 2014 Ness delivered the keynote speech at the Children's and Young Adult Program of the Berlin International Literature Festival.
On 1 October 2015, the BBC announced that Ness would be writing a Doctor Who spin-off entitled Class, and the resulting eight-part series aired on BBC Three's online channel toward the end of 2016. In 2017, Ness announced that he was leaving the show at the end of the first season. The BBC later cancelled the series Class.
Ness' most recent book, Release, was published on 4 May 2017, dubbed by Ness as a 'private and intense book', with more personal inspiration than any before it.
