Featured Interview With Peter Gates
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in the housing schemes of Glasgow during the 1980s. I now live in the Scottish Highlands, in Ross-shire, with my wife, our three children, and our French Bulldog, Boss, who’s eight years old.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Honestly, books have never really been my thing, my fascination has always been with documentaries rather than the page, especially true crime and anything to do with ancient civilisations. Writing came from a different place entirely. I started in February 2026, not out of a lifelong love of reading, but as a way to release decades of abuse and trauma I’d been carrying. It became the outlet reading never was for me.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I don’t read a lot myself, dyslexia makes that hard going, so my inspiration comes less from a reading list and more from honest, unflinching depictions of working-class Scottish life on screen. Looking After Jo Jo, Frank Deasy’s BBC Scotland drama, and Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s novel, both shaped how I think about voice and place. Beyond Welsh, I’d point to William McIlvanney, often called the father of Tartan Noir, and Denise Mina for how she writes Glasgow without softening it. True crime documentaries feed into my writing too, that same refusal to look away from the truth is what I’m reaching for in my own work.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is Fibromyalgia? The Research Patients Actually Need to See: The questions. The evidence. The receipts. It’s not fiction, it’s the product of more than a decade of my own research into a condition I live with every day. I wrote it because I got tired of walking into appointments with nothing but pain and no way to back myself up. So I built the case myself: the studies, the evidence, the exact questions patients need to ask doctors who too often dismiss what they can’t easily see or test for. It’s for anyone who’s been told “it’s just stress” or “try to relax more” one too many times. It took shape over years of living with the illness, but the actual writing came together in a matter of months once I finally sat down and got it all out. Alongside that, I also write Scottish crime fiction under the same name, the Blood on the Clyde trilogy, drawing on a very different part of my life.
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