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Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, the first novel he spent 10 years writing based on his own experience of a childhood in Glasgow marked by poverty and addiction. The author recently revealed that 30 publishers had rejected the book before it was accepted by Picador.
Margaret Busby, Chairperson of the Judges, said: “Shuggie Bain is destined to be a classic – a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values. The heartbreaking story tells of the unconditional love between Agnes Bain, who descends into alcoholism due to the difficult circumstances that life has faced her, and her youngest son.
Shuggie struggles with responsibilities beyond her years to save her mother from herself, all the while dealing with burgeoning feelings and questions about her own otherness. Written with grace and strength, this is a novel that packs a punch due to its many emotional registers and its compassionately performed characters. The poetry in Douglas Stuart’s descriptions and the precision of his observations stand out: nothing is wasted.
“Shuggie Bain Can Make You Cry and Laugh: A Daring, Scary, and Life-Changing Novel.”
Stuart, 44, dedicated the book to his own mother, who died of alcoholism when he was 16. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York to begin a career in fashion design, working for brands. like Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, and Gap. The New Yorker has published two of his short stories this year. Stuart credited the 1994 Booker winner How Late It Was, James Kelman’s How Late for changing his life because it was one of the first times he saw his people and their dialect on the page. He is currently finishing his second novel, Loch Awe, also set in Glasgow.
This week, The Librero reported that Shuggie Bain is the best-selling title of the six shortlisted books.
Douglas Stuart spent 10 years writing Shuggie Bain, which 30 publishers rejected before it was accepted by Picador.
John Self in The Irish Times wrote: “Shuggie Bain is the one who moves the heart of the short list: a young man from Glasgow in the 1980s struggling to deal with an alcoholic mother and the knowledge that she is not all that ‘manly’ as expected. There are no outlandish things here – Shuggie’s story is told in a linear and straightforward manner, which is best at tearing the reader’s emotions apart. Her life is stunted not just from the beginning, but from before the beginning – her mother Agnes didn’t stand a chance either, and somehow she’s a more central character than Shuggie.
“Where Stuart shows the least confidence is in his unwillingness to trust the reader, inserting his own perceptions in place of the characters’, and hammering tragedy after tragedy. Life, after all, cannot be completely without light. On this year’s list, Shuggie Bain would be a very worthy winner. “
The £ 50,000 prize was announced at a “ceremony without walls” at the London Roundhouse with the Duchess of Cornwall, former US President Barack Obama and three former winners: Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo.
Busby said the decision was unanimous and took less than an hour. The other judges were Lee Child; Sameer Rahim; Lemn Sissay; and Emily Wilson. Addressing the preponderance of debuts on this year’s shortlist, he said, “Although it might be the first book to be published, you don’t know how long they’ve been working on their craft.”
Awarded for the first time in 1969, the Booker Prize is recognized as the premier prize for literary fiction written in English. It was jointly won last year by Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Anna Burns was the last Irish winner in 2018 for Milkman.
Q&A with Douglas Stuart
Shuggie Bain takes place in the 1980s in Glasgow. How did it feel to write about your hometown from such a distance, spatially and temporally?
Shuggie Bain’s characters couldn’t exist anywhere else; Glasgow is as much in his blood as it is in mine. When you come from a place of such strong character – oppressive, tough, caring, hilarious, aggressive, maddening – it shapes who you are for the rest of your life. My childhood in Glasgow was tough, and the distance certainly helped me draw the story from my experiences in the city. That distance brought clarity but also allowed me to fall in love with the city again.
Your novel navigates difficult themes like poverty, alcoholism, and abandonment with immense love and compassion. Would you say optimism is important to you and, if so, why?
It is very Scottish to face difficult things frankly. The people of Glasgow who have done him the most are the most compassionate and generous people I have ever met. They also have such humility that they have a dislike for anyone who thinks they have it especially bad, because a lot of people had a hard time under Thatcher in the 1980s, and we were certainly all in it together. Mammies and Grannies are not going to put up with your complaints because if you think you have it wrong … oh! When you don’t have the comfort of money, you are forced to deal with life up front, and sometimes love, humor, and optimism are all you can bring to a bad situation. I think Glasgow is a city of reluctant optimists by default. How would we have survived otherwise?
What is your favorite Booker Prize winning novel?
How late was James Kelman’s How late changed my life. It’s such a bold book, the prose and stream of consciousness is truly inventive. But it is also one of the first times that I saw my people, my dialect, on the page.
What can we expect from you next?
I am currently putting the finishing touches on my next novel, Loch Awe. It is set in the 1990s in Glasgow and is the story of two teenagers, who fall in love despite being divided by territorial and sectarian lines. Take a look at toxic masculinity and the pressure we put on working-class guys to “become men.” I wanted to show how young men growing up in extreme poverty can be some of the most victimized and neglected people in British society. I always look for tenderness in the hardest places.
The questions and answers were first posted on the Booker Prize website.
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