After taking a variety of jobs, he became a journalist for a number of different newspapers and had the opportunity to work as a reporter in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and also in Korea.

After additional travels in East Asia between 1964 and 1980 (including Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, China), he returned to Weimar.

His topics and exciting prose made him especially popular in East Germany, and he had altogether nine million copies printed in nine different languages.

Thürk was a very controversial author because of his political themes as well as the frequent sex scenes in his novels.

However, Thürk, a member of the Socialist Unity Party also prompted controversy within the Communist sphere, for example with his depictions of battle scenes involving German troops against the Red Army in his novel Die Stunde der toten Augen (1957).