lockdowns as a reason why his books retain an authenticity that reflect his own sense of humour and resonates with readers.
“I was living alone and very bored in lockdown,” Nathanael explains. “I had a creative writing degree, and I hadn’t written a creative word in several years and so in my boredom I thought ‘let me see if I can still write’. I wrote something that turned into the first draft of my first book and friends and family gave me bit of feedback – ‘this works’ or ‘this doesn’t’, but they all said it was kind of good and so I thought that maybe an agent might like it.”
He headed to the internet in search of agents, but “not thinking anything of it,” and “I got lucky one day and an agent got back to me, and they were legit and they liked the book – I signed with them and that was a dream come true. Then my agent told me that publishers liked it, and I was being published – at that time I was writing articles on plug sockets.” Nathanael admits that without the boredom of lockdown, his stories might never have seen the light of day. “I wasn’t very creative and in a lot of ways I’m still not. I didn’t have a burning desire to write that I know that lots of authors have. During lockdown I watched every season of Game of Thrones, and I watched everything on Netflix. And then it got to a point where I was so bored that I was re-enacting scenes from Disney films. I’d learn entire Britney Spears songs and sing them out loud. [Writing] was more of way to stave off boredom than this innate need to write.”
And it wasn’t the first time that boredom had driven him to writing. His initial desire to take a creative writing course came while he was working in a call centre when “I was getting maybe two or three phone calls a day. And the other eight hours I had to entertain myself. I started writing silly little poems and essays just to have fun at work. And I thought ‘wow, I’m really enjoying this’. I looked online and
Nathanael on stage receiving the Shadowers’ Choice Medal for Writing at The Carnegies.
saw that creative writing was a course at university.”
This led him not to a career in creative writing, but into marketing – hence the reason he was writing about plug sockets during lockdown. But things have changed since becoming a published author – especially around his motivation for writing. Nathanael says: “I definitely have [that need to write] now. If I’m not writing, I have a fear of missing out. I get FOMO when I’m not writing. So, I could be sitting, chatting with friends and in the back of my mind thinking, I really want to go home to my laptop and carry on writing whatever the next draft is. “So yeah, lockdown was a very strange time, and I do appreciate that I did get very lucky, as well as being very fortunate that I didn’t have this story in me for a decade, I wasn’t trying to sell it to everyone under the sun. It was just something that happened, and I guess I’m
© Tom Pilston
the luckiest person in the world.” Anyone who has read any of Nathanael’s books will be unsurprised to learn that he has concerns about the outside influences on boys, growing up in a world of social media that provides access to unfiltered opinions. He points to toxic masculinity as being a particular threat, saying: “It’s horrible – this growing toxic masculinity. When I was growing up it was a bunch of teenage boys harassing someone at a bus stop, and these same kids would never harass anyone if they were by themselves. But in a group, they’d feel empowered to be misogynistic.
“There has been a rise in these horrible internet influencers, who have been around for several years now, lurking in the shadows a bit like Sauron. We had all of these nasty things, but it just keeps evolving – these horrible pickup artist books in the noughties that everyone was into, and now it became mainstream and a lot more widely accepted with the rise of people like Andrew Tate.”
He adds that the likes of Andrew Tate didn’t invent toxic masculinity, “but he has made it mainstream and acceptable in a way that it wasn’t before. My little cousins and nephews were coming up to me quoting Andrew Tate and it kind of resonated with me in a really nasty way, a bit like a stain that I needed to scrub off.” Younger children, who may not be seeing content first hand, are often hearing the same messages from older children – whether through school or family members and Nathanael describes it as radicalisation, saying: “The radicalisation of young men against women starts young and now we’re seeing boys who have been pretty much groomed into misogyny from a young age. They’re
22 PEN&INC. Autumn-Winter 2025
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