Comic timing is necessary at a time of online confusion, says Nathanael Lessore

"I still vividly remember what it was like to be awkward. Even now. I don’t have the insecurities of a teenager, but I’m still kind of just bumbling my way through life.” Nathanael Lessore, the author of the award-winning Steady for This and King of Nothing, is talking about his ability to write about the realities of life for teenagers today. His next book, What Happens Online, is about a boy called Fred who hides behind an online persona, and the pain of adolescence is something Lessore remembers well. “I had all the insecurities and the oddities,” he says. “I was a shy kid in the corner and when I look back now I think, ‘How did I make it through life?’”

That awkwardness is something that the author channelled into Fred, the hero of What Happens Online. In real life, Fred is unpopular, and is dealing with some family issues. Fred does, however, have a trick up his sleeve because online he is known as Existor@stmarks, one of the best gamers around. Fred decides to use his online persona to help “Fred the loser”, so begins spreading outlandish rumours about his classmates.

His bullies are shunned, and people finally begin to take notice of him. Life is temporarily good. But, when his falsehoods get out of hand, the web of lies comes tumbling down.

The prevalence of gaming and social media is something Lessore sees every time he does an event at a secondary school, and he has heard “horrific stories of online bullying and kids scrolling through celebrities wishing they had that life”.

Lessore says: “In a way, I wanted to show that social media itself is a video game. It’s a simulation – people are showing you the part they want you to see.” Teenagers can find it hard to differentiate the online world and the real world, he says, and “we know from science and research that there are detrimental effects of being online”.

But if any Lessore fans are worried that this all sounds too serious, they need not worry. Being a gamer “isn’t all doom and gloom”, Lessore says, and gamers (and Lessore is one himself) are usually just “helpful nerds giving each other passwords”. What Happens Online is also, like his previous novels, very funny indeed. “I never set out to write comedy,” he says. “The one thing that was drummed into me at university was ‘write what you know’ and, apparently, what I know people find amusing… I think that I myself am not that funny, but I’m surrounded by funny people and funny things happen to me.

“I’ve told this story before, but I moved into a new house about four years ago and I didn’t know what cockroaches looked like. I thought there were loads of beetles everywhere. And then, a couple of weeks later, I went to see my GP and when I went to pull a tissue out of my pocket, a cockroach fell from it onto the floor in between me and my doctor… He was so disgusted.”

I wanted to show that social media itself is a video game. It’s a simulation – people are showing you the part they want you to see

Lessore grew up as one of eight children in South London, and his busy home life was great for creativity and imaginative play, but becoming an author wasn’t an obvious career choice at first (“I got two Cs for my English GCSEs,” he says). The writing came later, when he was working in a call centre in his 20s. He didn’t have enough work to do, so started writing essays and poems to stave off boredom and entertain the people who shared his desk.

It was “really random stuff”, he says. “One that I wrote was about the realistic repercussions of the song It’s Raining Men. Are these sentient men who are being rained? And what does it mean for the population? Are they surviving the impact?"

This led to him applying to university to study creative writing – where the tutors taught him about emotional beats and structure – and during lockdown he started working on what would eventually be Steady for This, his first novel.

The manuscript was picked up by Hot Key Books and went on to be hugely successful in terms of prizes, winning the Branford Boase Award (for a debut) and the Diverse Book Awards Children’s Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie Medal. His second book, King of Nothing is, at the time of writing, in the running for this year’s Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and is on the recently announced longlist for this year’s Yoto Carnegie. Both are adored by the critics.

He is modest about his achievements, giving a lot of credit to his editor, Ella Whiddett, but acknowledges that he must be doing something right. When he does school visits it is often the pupils who pretend they are not interested, the “boisterous people in the crowd, the ones who have to be shushed”, who are first in line to get their books signed.

So what’s next? What Happens Online will be released in April and there will be at least one more novel by him coming from Hot Key Books. Lessore is also working on a 20,000-word book for a German publisher that will be a contemporary take on Romeo and Juliet, which is a “lot of fun” and, again, incorporates an anecdote from Lessore’s own life. “At one point he’s wearing a wig in his bedroom and it catches on a scented candle and the wig goes up in flames. And rather than taking the wig off, he kind of slaps the flames out with his hands. So  he’s got bandages up his arms and she [the Juliet character] embarrasses him at school and tells everybody. So to get back at her, he joins her drama club to ruin her production of Romeo and Juliet.”

But in general, Lessore says he doesn’t have grand plans or aspirations. “I’m just grateful to make it to the next day and the next week,” he says. “It’s a bit of a cliché but I’m enjoying the journey and where I’m going, I’m just feeling my way forward.”