Allan Gaw

Allan Gaw does not have a cat. Nor does he live in a converted barn in Surrey with his wife and two children. He did not do a masters in creative writing after his BA and he has never worked in advertising or been a secondary school teacher.

On the contrary, he is a Scot who lives and works near Glasgow. He studied medicine and is a pathologist by training but a writer by inclination. Having worked in the NHS and universities in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and the US, he now devotes his time to writing.

Most of his published work to date is non-fiction. These include textbooks and regular magazine articles on topics as diverse as the thalidomide story, the medical challenges of space travel and the medico-legal consequences of the Hillsborough disaster.

More recently, he has been writing short stories, novels and poetry. He has won the UK Classical Association Creative Writing Competition, the International Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the International Globe Soup 7 day Writing Challenge and was runner-up in the Glencairn Glass/Bloody Scotland Short Crime Fiction Competition. He has also had prose published in the literary journal, From Glasgow to Saturn and anthologies from the Edinburgh Literary Salon and the Federation of Writers Scotland. His poetry has been published by Dreich, Soor Ploom Press, Black Bough Poetry, The Candyman’s Trumpet and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. His poetry collections, Love & Other Diseases and The Sounds Men Make were published in 2023 and 2025 respectively by Seahorse Publications.

The Silent House of Sleep was his debut novel and is the first in the Dr Jack Cuthbert series. It won the 2024 Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. His second novel in the series, The Moon’s More Feeble Fire, was long listed for the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish Crime Novel of the Year in 2025. The Dr Jack Cuthbert series is published by Polygon in the UK.