Costa-award winning novelist Christie Watson: ‘I’m doing a form of literary whistleblowing about the NHS’

Before she became a bestselling author, Christie Watson worked as a nurse for the NHS. She talks to Nick Duerden about why nurses hated being clapped during the pandemic, why her new novel depicts health professionals as real people rather than saints, and her ‘woo woo’ solution for burnt out doctors

Novelist Christie Watson (Alan Howard)

Whenever a former medic turns writer, and becomes intent on lifting the lid of what really happens on hospital wards and within consultation rooms, it’s easy to imagine the NHS’s top brass holding their heads in their hands and keening quietly to themselves. Adam Kay’s 2016 memoir This Is Going to Hurt, about his time as an NHS doctor, might have been a critical and commercial hit, but it shed uncomfortable light on the often barely-contained chaotic reality of life as a medic.

And now here comes Christie Watson, a former nurse turned Costa award-winning writer to do something similar with her new novel Moral Injuries. At home in her kitchen in south London, she grins impishly.

“The NHS’s worst nightmare? I do hope that’s not going to be the headline!” she says. Shifting in her seat as if to eradicate a sudden discomfort, she continues. “I’m actually very pro the NHS, and how to help save it is the heartbeat of everything I do. What can I do with the platform I have? How can I shout about issues that matter? At the moment, the fact that doctors and nurses are suffering so much and leaving in droves is a really big problem, but unless people know about it then it won’t be solved. So, I suppose that, yes, in a way what I’m doing is a kind of literary whistleblowing.”