Nathan Filer

Nathan Filer is a British novelist and mental health nurse born in 1980. He trained as a nurse and worked in psychiatric settings before becoming a writer. The Shock of the Fall (2013, HarperCollins) is his debut novel, narrated by a young man living with schizophrenia who is writing about the death of his brother. It won the Costa Book of the Year, the Betty Trask Award in 2014, and several other prizes. The novel is remarkable for its formal innovation — using typography, whitespace, and different voices to render mental illness from the inside — and for its compassionate realism, drawing on Filer's clinical experience. It became an international bestseller. His second novel, The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia (2019), is a hybrid work combining memoir, case history, and polemic, examining how the diagnosis of schizophrenia is understood and misunderstood. Filer has been an advocate for mental health awareness in the arts and has written widely on the relationship between storytelling and psychiatric practice.