William Thirsk-Gaskill

William Thirsk-Gaskill was born in Leeds and lives in Wakefield. He studied chemistry at Liverpool University, and then worked in Poole, where he was miserable, and Glasgow, where he was happy.  While an undergraduate at Liverpool, he was the sex correspondent for a fanzine called ‘Dregs’, which achieved a circulation of 2,500.

He increased writing fiction and poetry while studying with the Open University. It was not long before he became a regular performer on the West Yorkshire spoken word circuit.  He performed five times during Ilkley Literature Festival 2012, four as part of the Walking The Line event, lead by Michael Stewart, and once as a solo performer at Ilkley Playhouse, under the title ‘Throwing Mother In The Skip’, the title poem of what would become his debut collection, published by Stairwell Books.  He got through his Diploma in English Literature with Creative Writing by studying the smallest amount of literature that the curriculum allowed.

The subject matter of his work is the frustrations of everyday life, seen from a sideways angle. William tries to structure stories in which hardly anything happens, and in which tension is drawn to breaking-point.  He also writes sentences which are influenced by the elegance of certain earlier writers. He would say anything to get somebody to want to know what happens next.

His Twitter handle is @wthirskgaskill.

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