Matt Haig
Wellbeing programmes have multiplied while anxiety, burnout, and mental ill-health inside organisations keep climbing. Most communications on the subject still sound like policy. Employees can tell the difference between language designed to satisfy a board and language that comes from someone who has been through it.
Matt Haig is a number one bestselling author and mental health writer who helps organisations talk about anxiety, depression, and modern overload in a register people actually trust.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Matt Haig
- A first-person account of severe depression and suicidal crisis that has shaped public mental health conversation in the UK, told by someone whose books on the subject have topped national bestseller charts.
- A literary platform of unusual scale: The Midnight Library alone has sold over ten million copies and won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, which means his name lands with employees and leaders before he opens his mouth.
- Notes on a Nervous Planet gives him a developed argument about anxiety and the digital environment that maps directly onto how work now feels for most knowledge workers.
- He sits outside the clinical and HR registers that dominate workplace wellbeing content. The voice is a working writer’s, which is why audiences listen rather than tolerate.
Biography highlights
- Author of Reasons to Stay Alive, a number one Sunday Times bestseller that spent 46 weeks in the UK top 10 and won the 2016 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award for Non-Fiction.
- Author of The Midnight Library, winner of the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and a New York Times bestseller with more than ten million copies sold worldwide.
- Author of the Sunday Times number one bestseller Notes on a Nervous Planet, on anxiety, social media, and modern life.
- Novelist whose adult fiction includes The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, The Comfort Book, and The Life Impossible.
- Children’s author whose Shadow Forest won the Nestle Smarties Book Prize Gold Award and whose A Boy Called Christmas was adapted into a feature film with Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, and Kristen Wiig.
- Translated into more than fifty languages, with a public platform on mental health that reaches well beyond the literary audience.
Biography
The honest conversation about anxiety and depression inside organisations is harder than the policy version. Most employees have read the wellbeing email. Far fewer have heard a senior voice describe what panic actually feels like at three in the morning, or why the always-on environment makes recovery slower than it should be. That is the gap Matt Haig’s writing has been filling for a decade.
Reasons to Stay Alive, his memoir of a near-fatal breakdown at twenty-four, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and stayed in the UK top ten for forty-six weeks. It won the 2016 Books Are My Bag Readers’ Award for Non-Fiction and changed how a generation of British readers spoke about depression. Notes on a Nervous Planet followed in 2018 with a sharper argument: that the texture of modern life, especially digital life, is a major part of why so many people feel ill. Both books are short, plain, and unguarded, which is why they have travelled.
Alongside the memoirs is a serious fiction career. The Midnight Library won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, became an instant New York Times bestseller, and has sold over ten million copies worldwide. The Humans, How to Stop Time, The Radleys, The Comfort Book, and The Life Impossible sit alongside it. Children’s titles include Shadow Forest, a Nestle Smarties Gold winner, and A Boy Called Christmas, adapted in 2021 into a feature film with Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Sally Hawkins, and Kristen Wiig.
For organisations, the value is straightforward. Haig is not a clinician and does not pretend to be. He is a working writer with a global readership who has thought longer and more publicly about anxiety, depression, and modern overload than almost any non-specialist alive. Audiences listen because he has earned the subject, and because the language is recognisably his own.
Key speaking topics
- Mental health in the workplace
- Depression and anxiety in modern life
- Digital overload and always-on culture
- Resilience and recovery
- Storytelling and the language of wellbeing
- Creativity under pressure
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of wellbeing programming a serious-register keynote on mental health.
- Internal events tied to World Mental Health Day, Mental Health Awareness Week, or wider EVP and culture moments.
- Leadership offsites where the brief is to model open conversation about anxiety, burnout, and pressure rather than to brief on policy.
- Employee audiences in high-intensity sectors (finance, professional services, media, tech) where always-on working is part of the culture.
Audience outcomes
- A first-person account of severe depression and recovery that gives employees permission to talk about their own experience.
- A clearer argument for why digital life and modern work conditions amplify anxiety, drawn from Notes on a Nervous Planet.
- Practical anchors for managing low moods, panic, and the social media environment, in language that does not sound like a wellness pamphlet.
- A reminder, useful for leaders, that the most credible communications about mental health do not sound like communications.
- Permission to treat mental health as a normal subject of adult conversation rather than a compliance topic.