I first met Allan Gaw at a spoken word, open-mic event in the small lounge of a country pub not far from the shores of Loch Lomond. He was reading a selection of poems and a passage from his self-published novel, The Silent House of Sleep. During an evening where many of the readers narrated tales of scenery, gardens, tapestries and paintings, Gaw’s writing stood out as fresh, evocative and powerful, and he read with a strong voice of certainty.

Since that autumn evening, I have grown to enjoy Gaw’s writing all the more. He has a demonstrable understanding of people, and it is his ability to create believable characters and to portray complex emotions in minimal words that captivate readers and listeners alike.

‘Some think I specialize in poets. But although I’ve had some notable successes there, you should know I also do artists, musicians and the occasional opera singer. But they’re all really the icing on the cake. My real bread and butter are the miners, the dockers and the poor, huddling in their freezing overcrowded tenements. And of course, the children.’

These opening lines from Gaw’s poem Mycobacterium tuberculosis contrast starkly with this stanza from his poem Miracle…

I turned, we reached, we touched by chance,
I apologised, you smiled, I smiled too. I spoke, you
gazed, I longed,
and in that moment my fate was sealed
Because I could see the smallest of miracles in you,
I could see my forever in your eyes.

Disparate in content as they may seem, both extracts – found in his first collection of poetry, Love and Other Diseases – are linked by more than the title of a collection. Gaw is a powerful writer who eruditely exposes the emotions, connectedness and vulnerabilities of the human condition. He is also a former pathologist and clinical researcher.

In 2022, Gaw’s The Silent House of Sleep won the Scottish Association of Writers Dragon’s Pen Award for best book pitch. That year also saw him win the U.K. Classical Association’s Creative Writing Competition for his short story The Mother of Heroes, the International Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize for the short story Excision and the international Globe Soup Challenge #7 for his short story Dead Famous. He followed this with a 2023 season that saw him as runner-up in the International Crime Short Story competition, run by The Glencairn Glass in collaboration with Bloody Scotland and Scottish Field magazine. After self-publishing The Silent House of Sleep in 2023, the book earned the Bloody Scotland debut Crime Novel Prize. His short stories and poetry have appeared in many anthologies and publications.

Born in Glasgow, Gaw studied chemical pathology at Victoria Infirmary, Glasgow, and at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Beginning his career in the field of clinical medicine, he transferred to the scientific field of laboratory medicine where his work on human metabolism and cholesterol-lowering drugs earned him a PhD. His postdoctoral studies took him to the laboratories of distinguished Nobel laureates Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown in Dallas, Texas. On returning to Glasgow, there ensued a series of high-profile roles including responsibility for leading the clinical trials unit at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and professor and director of the clinical research facility at Queen’s University, Belfast. His academic writings amount to more than 150 papers, reviews and book contributions, along with 20 textbooks he has authored or edited.

It is a formidable contribution to his field of expertise. As Gaw explains, the transition to creative writing came naturally.

“I have always enjoyed writing and reading. Throughout my career I have written many academic papers, technical reports and magazine articles. The skills of research and presentation, of how to use language to engage the reader and hold their interest, are not so far away from what is required to write fiction. It is a matter of transferring the skills I have learned over a lifetime to a new type of writing.”

Although I first connected with Gaw through his poetry, his foray into creative writing began in 2018 with short stories. “The poetry came later,” he notes, adding,

“I now split my time between prose and poetry. I often write one before the other and find that each can inform the other by presenting different ways of seeing things.”

“Poetry is such a powerful medium in the way it uses minimal words to convey often complex ideas or emotions.”

In late 2021 Gaw joined the Strathkelvin Writers’ Group, a step he regards as significant in his new writing career, giving him the opportunity to engage with a group of serious and talented authors. He made his mark on the group instantly, winning several of its competitions and later being called upon to judge others’ work. He read one of his poems in public for the first time in 2022 and published The Silent House of Sleep a year later. It was to be the first of a three-book series introducing the protagonist Dr. Jack Cuthbert, a Scottish doctor working with Scotland Yard in London. In modern-day terms he would be referred to as a forensic pathologist, but the story is set in the late 1920s, several decades before that term was coined.

Gaw has always been drawn to interesting characters, whether they be in real life or works of fiction. Cuthbert is such a character. In his early 30s, tall, striking and officious, yet charismatic and extremely good at his job. He not only bears the mental scars of his experiences in the trenches of WWI, but he harbours a dark secret; he is homosexual. At a time when homosexuality was illegal, this Achilles’ heel renders him vulnerable. His first case involves the discovery of not one but two bodies and presents him with one of the most baffling and disturbing cases of his career. Solving it will bring a tsunami of memories to bear upon the doctor.

As a former pathologist himself, it is perhaps unsurprising that Gaw’s novel is centered around a character in this line of work. Creative writers are often encouraged to write about what they know. Since publishing The Silent House of Sleep, Cuthbert’s forensic abilities and further revelations about his own character have been developed in the second and third books of the current series, The Moon’s More Feeble Fire and To the Shades Descend. The series is now published by Polygon.

Gaw’s productivity is as impressive as the quality of what he writes. His latest poetry collection, The Sounds Men Make, launched earlier this year by Seahorse Publications, offers some 45 poems that explore what it is to be male in the modern world. The poems cover everything from what women expect of men to adolescent shaving and the discovery of deodorant, love, homosexuality and, tragically, suicide, to name but a few. It is nothing short of a masterful collection of emotive works that will captivate men and women alike. Once again, it is Gaw’s skill at getting under the surface of the skin to reveal hidden thoughts and depths of character that make this collection so unique. In his own words from the preface…

‘I am a man, and I have my own individual experiences to share of what that means. But this collection is not about me; it is about the plurality of the male experience in the 21st century. As such, when writing these poems, I have chosen to walk in the shoes of many other men – young and old, gay and straight, loud and quiet, abused and abusing, whole and broken. It is their diverse voices you hear in these poems, not mine.’

Gaw’s great skill is enabling us to hear the voices of others.

Story by Tom Langlands   
Photos supplied by Allan Gaw
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