C. R. de Gernon is the creator of A Yorkshire Gospel, a comic mythology set among the villages, pubs and coastline of East Yorkshire.

Behind this pen name is an East Yorkshire GP whose two professions share more in common than might first appear: both begin by listening carefully to other people’s stories.

At school, GCSE Drama became the first place his imagination truly found an audience. His grades never quite reflected his enthusiasm, but performing — and occasionally writing — left a lasting impression. During sixth form he played the unforgettable Egor in the school pantomime, a role popular enough to earn an encore the following year.

After studying Biomedical Sciences at Nottingham Trent University and working in cytology at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, a chance conversation changed the course of his life. A visiting Australian pathologist asked a simple question:

“Are you enjoying your job?”

The honest answer was “not really.”

The pathologist’s reply has stayed with him ever since:

“Can’t means won’t.”

Encouraged by that advice, he returned to evening classes, gained the qualifications he needed, and went on to study Medicine at the University of Leicester.

There he met lifelong friends, discovered the medic’s revue, wrote comedy sketches, and realised that humour and storytelling came as naturally to him as medicine.

During medical school, comedy writing and performance became a welcome counterbalance to anatomy textbooks and exams, rekindling a love of absurd humour that had begun years earlier on the school stage.

After qualifying, he returned to East Yorkshire to support his recently widowed grandmother before eventually becoming a GP.  Years spent working across the area introduced him to the people, villages and quiet eccentricities that would later inspire A Yorkshire Gospel.

Medicine answered questions.  Writing allowed him to ask them. After years devoted to medicine, family life and listening to extraordinary stories in ordinary consulting rooms, he eventually began telling some of his own.  The stories arrived with unexpected force.  What began as a single comic novel became an interconnected fictional universe spanning relics, theology, folklore, and the villages of Holderness.

A Yorkshire Gospel began not as an attempt to write satire, but as a simple question:

What if one of history’s greatest biblical mysteries had been quietly waiting in an ordinary Yorkshire village all along?

Although the theology is entirely fictional, almost every village, road and landscape in this series exists.  Holderness is not merely the setting; it is one of the principal characters.

The story is rapidly growing into an expanding comic mythology celebrating friendship, faith, folklore and the wonderfully practical nature of Yorkshire people.

When he is not writing, he continues to work as a GP, where listening to people’s stories remains one of the greatest privileges of the job — and perhaps the greatest inspiration for the next Verse.

A Yorkshire Gospel is planned as an expanding series of interconnected Verses exploring faith, folklore, friendship and the peculiar logic of Yorkshire life.  Each mystery answers another while uncovering something even stranger.

C. R. de Gernon

This Chronicle has only just begun.