Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart is the Glasgow-born writer who won the 2020 Booker Prize with his debut novel Shuggie Bain, a tender and unsparing portrait of a boy growing up in the hard-pressed Glasgow of the 1980s.

Growing up in Glasgow

Born in Sighthill in Glasgow in 1976, Stuart had a working-class childhood shadowed by poverty and by his mother’s struggles with addiction, which he has spoken about openly and which lie at the heart of his fiction. He trained in textiles and design and, after a masters at the Royal College of Art, moved to New York at twenty-four to work in fashion.

A decade of secret writing

For ten years Stuart wrote in his spare time, telling no one, while building a career designing for labels such as Calvin Klein. The novel he was working on, drawn from his own upbringing, became Shuggie Bain. It had been turned down many times before it was finally published in 2020.

Shuggie Bain and after

Shuggie Bain tells the story of young Shuggie and his mother Agnes in 1980s Glasgow, and won the 2020 Booker Prize, making Stuart only the second Scot, after James Kelman, to take the award. His second novel, Young Mungo, followed in 2022. His work has given a lasting voice to a working-class Glasgow of tenements and hardship. Now living in New York but forever drawn back to the city of his childhood, Stuart has become one of the most celebrated chroniclers of modern Glasgow and its culture.