Glasgow author Stuart wins the Booker Prize with debut novel Shuggie Bain
Glaswegian author Douglas Stuart has won the Book er Prize with a debut novel which took him more than a decade to write.
The 44-year-old has become only the second Scottish author to win the coveted literary prize for the book, which focuses on a young boy struggling to help his mother as she battles with alcoholism.
Se tina Glasgow council housing estate during the 1980s, in early years of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, Shuggie Bain was partly inspired by Stuart’s own upbringing in the city and losing his own mother to alcoholism when he was just 16.
The book was written while Stuart was working as a fashion designer in New York, where he still lives, however he has insisted that the central characters could not have existed anywhere other than Glasgow.
He is working on a second Glasgow-set novel, Loch Awe, which will focus on a love story between two teenage boys from either side of the city’ s sectarian divide.
Stuart has told previously how reading Glaswegian author James Kelman’s 1994 Booker winner - How Late It Was, How Late – changed his life.
Stuart said: “It is such a bold book, the prose and stream of consciousness is really inventive. But it is also one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page.”
Stuart’s win, which secures him a £50,000 prize, was announced at the end of an awards ceremony featuring appearances by former American President Barack Obama and the Duchess of Cornwall.
Margaret Bus by, chair of this year’s Booker Prize judging panel, said: “‘Shuggie Bain is destined to be a classic— a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tightknit social world, its people and its values.
"The heart-wrenching story tells of the unconditional love between Agnes Bain — set on a descent into alcoholism by the tough circumstances life has dealt her — and her youngest son.
"Shuggie struggles with responsibilities beyond his years to save his mother from herself, at the same time as dealing with burgeoning feelings and questions about his own otherness.
"Gracefully and powerfully written, this is a novel that has impact because of its many emotional register sand its compassionately realised characters.
"The poetry in Douglas Stuart’s descriptions and the precision of his observations stand out: nothing is wasted.”
In an interview about Shuggie Bain with The Scots man earlier this year, Stuart said:
“Being the son of a single mother meant my entire universe was women, other single mums and aunties.
"And being the son of an alcoholic meant that the parent/ child relationship was inverted and you’re given a real glimpse behind the curtain of things that little boys should never see.
"I just wanted to write about it because most of the books I admire, including Trainspotting, deal with men who are quite nihilistic, racing towards their own destruction. They’re quite gallus about it, embracing their hard-drinking or hard drugging. But when mothers struggle, there’s such a stigma and we’re so much harder on them which compounds their suffering.”