Nathanael Lessore, Branford Boase winner, on the challenges facing working class writers

Author Nathanael Lessore, who has just won the Branford Boase Award 2024 for his debut novel, Steady for This,  tells ReadingZone about his joy at winning an award 'for the team' - and how his working class background meant he almost didn't get to write his award-winning book.

Being a full-time writer is a dream that author Nathanael Lessore never considered could actually become a reality, despite completing a successful course in creative writing and having a passion and talent for telling stories. He's from Peckham, "a tall, racially ambiguous brown guy from a working class background", and his path into writing has been an uncertain one.

Publishing inaccessible 

After leaving school, Nathanael found himself working at MacDonalds for several years, first in Paris and then in Deptford, before he switched to a call centre which he felt offered more career options. He was in charge of a support line for customers in Ireland; with the many free hours this offered, he started to write things that would entertain himself and the people around him, and that gave him the impetus to study creative writing at the University of East London. 

While there, however, an editor visited.  "She talked about publishing and said 'if you're not white and in your 20s and a woman, and posh, forget about publishing because that's what it looks like'." This was around 2015, before the landscape started shifting a little in terms of diversity, and while it might not have been the editor's intended message, Nathanael says, "I don't have any of those attributes, so I kind of ruled publishing out. She made my mind up for me."

He also ruled out being a writer. "I thought, having a music degree doesn't make you Rihanna, and having a writing degree doesn't make you the next John Grisham, does it?"  Instead of writing, he turned to marketing, working his way up from marketing at an engineering company making plug sockets, to a medical company where he was marketing manager. "I really thought I'd finally made it," he chuckles.

Writing a first 'raw draft'

The itch to write was still there, though, and following a Netflix binge during a two-week break in lockdown (his manager refused to furlough staff; Nathanael cheekily got two weeks off after claiming he'd been near someone with Covid), his debut novel, Steady for This, poured out of him.  "I just wanted to see if I could write something, finish something. I ended up with a really raw draft that I was never going to look at again - but because a family member said they liked it, I thought I'd send it to an agent." He pauses. "I mean, he was probably just being kind and there am I sending it off to agents!"

He sent the draft to five agents and had one expression of interest, from Clare Wallace of Darley Andersen.  "Clare really liked the narrative voice, but not much else. Yeah, she hated everything else," he laughs. After further edits, Nathanael signed with Wallace but it wasn't until his book went to auction that he "started to see the world in new colours".

"I remember taking a lunch break to take Clare's call and just sitting on the on the floor, staring into space for three hours. I thought, if I just sell one book, I'm one book up; someone who isn't a family member will have bought my book."

Opening pathways for diverse writers

Nathanael believes there are things that might have opened a pathway to publishing at an earlier age for him. "When I was at school, if I had had a single author event, with an author who not just looked like me, but who was also vaguely from the same world as me, I might have thought that being an author was a possibility," he says. "I think what I'd say to publishers if they want to change things is, send out as many diverse authors to as many diverse regions as possible."

Nathanael has been busy himself visiting schools in deprived areas, and hopes he might be helping to change some students' narratives.  "I always start my events asking, 'how many of you think you could be a writer'?  There are never any hands, but by the end of the event, when I ask that question again, I get a smattering of raised hands."

He also thinks writing opportunities for schools in less affluent areas could help to open things up.  "When I was at school I wrote rap lyrics on my phone because I wanted to be a rapper" (his Steady for This character MC Growls is, he says, largely drawn from his own school days in Peckham), but writing rap lyrics "is no different from writing poetry". "At school, you get sneered at for writing poetry, and cheered for writing rap. If there was some kind of writing competition for students like me, then you're opening things up a little."

And even though he has achieved his dream of writing fulltime, Nathanael feels that growing up on an estate in Peckham, as much as he loved it, has left him ill prepared for life as an author.  "My life is spent in on the sofa, in my pyjamas, writing. I'm a bit good at writing, but I'm not good at being an author.  Being interviewed makes me nervous; I'm nervous and sweaty every time I do a school visit, even though they go well - I have groupies waiting for me at the school gates!  The librarians are so happy to see me, and they give me snacks and drinks. But it's so daunting when you're new to all this."  So how much support and event training is given to new authors is an area that publishers might want to revisit, given how much is now expected of authors in 'hand selling' their books directly to their audiences.

Changing attitudes to reading

The best response Nathanael gets during his events has been from teenage working class boys, he says.  "I'm often warned to watch out for the tricky ones, but I never have a single tricky student during my events."  What does he talk to them about, to help change attitudes?  "I tell them to read as much as possible because you need a head start in life, especially if you're not white.  But even if you are white - if you dress in a certain way or sound a certain way - then life is going to be a bit of a struggle.  The students know this, they know that they might be taken less seriously because of how they look and sound." 

While publishing is making inroads in terms of diversity, Nathanael says, "I really feel, one hundred percent, that 'diversity' seems to be almost exclusively racial."  He wants to see writing and publishing open up to those like him; people from working class backgrounds. Those who are changing things on the ground are, he says, the school librarians.  "I do get hope for these students when I meet the librarians; they really care about them. Teachers do too, but they are exhausted and focused on discipline. But librarians are the motivators, they're the ones who get books into students' hands and who keep trying to get them reading. They're on the front line."

As for the publishing world, he says, "There's a lot of talk about change which is encouraging; publishing seems to be overwhelmingly white and a bit posh, but there are smatterings of diversity and that gives me hope." Conversations are happening and no one is "dropping the ball"; he feels that it all sounds promising.

Making different stories available

It's also important for him that stories about lives like his are told - but through a different kind of lens. "Life on the estate where I grew up wasn't what people made it out to be.  When we moved there, people told me to be careful but I played football, rode around on my bike. We were just kids hanging out and there's a community feel to estates like that; everyone has your back.

"There are a lot a gritty novels about living on an estate, but my teenage years were just fun. I had my group of friends at school and we hung out, roasting each other, making jokes, hanging around at Peckham WHSmith because they sold cheap cans of coke."  Being at an all-boys school somewhat hampered any attempts at romance, though.  "None of us knew how to talk to anyone who wasn't from a rough boys' school." 

This is what he wanted to reflect in Steady for this: the fun and sense of community, the humour among friends, the angst about finding a girlfriend - all the things that he and his friends experienced as teenagers.  That he has done this so successfully is reflected in the number of award shortlists that Steady for This has appeared in recently, including the Carnegies, Jhalak Prize and UKLA Book Awards, as well as the Branford Boase Award for debut writers and their editors. 

Winning Branford Boase 'for the team'

Like these earlier industry awards, Nathanael hadn't come across the Branford Boase Award until he was shortlisted for it. When he learned what it was for, and that he had won, he was thrilled.  "I've always maintained, from the beginning of my writing journey, that it takes 20 people to write a book.  If you look at the team behind Steady for This, there's my agent, my brothers and cousins who read the drafts and gave me pointers, my agent Clare Wallace, and my editors Ella Whiddett and Ruth Bennett who know the characters and the universe so thoroughly, and who did so much to get the book to the best place it could be.

"The Branford Boase Award reminds us that, without those people, without my brother giggling while scrolling through the book on his phone, this book would never have been made.  So it's an award that celebrates everyone, and that's the thing that means the world to me; that it is celebrated as a collective."

Nathanael's second novel for teenagers, King of Nothing, has followed Steady for This - both published by Hot Key Books - and he is now writing a middle grade novel about superheroes, a small town, and levitating squirrels!  Another funny novel for teenagers might follow but it will be very different from his earlier books, he says.

Whatever he writes, laughter is important to him; it has always been part of his world.  "I grew up in a family of eight, and my siblings are all very close in age. It was chaotic - lots of fallings out but lots of fun too, especially at meal times," he explains. "My family are so sharp with each other and being in that kind of environment definitely helps when it comes to writing things that are funny. So if I can make my grumpy brother laugh, like he did with Steady for This, then I know I'm on the right track with my next book."