Until his debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker, Douglas Stuart would tell people it had been rejected 20 times. His agent, he recalls with a smile, thought that once he’d won the prize it was finally time to reveal the truth: “No, you were rejected 40 times. I just stopped telling you.”
It wasn’t that editors disliked Shuggie Bain but that they didn’t know how to market the semi-autobiographical story of a boy growing up on a housing scheme in 1980s Glasgow with an absent father and an alcoholic mother. It was, Stuart says, “too sad, too Scottish, very much out of the zeitgeist”.
Even when it was published, expectations were low. So, when the Booker made Shuggie Bain only the second Scottish winner in its history, and a massive bestseller, it felt like a landmark win. Stuart’s own story added to the novel’s allure: a working-class orphan who was a high-flying fashion designer in New York for two decades before becoming a professional author. It was no one-off. Young Mungo, in 2022, was another acclaimed hit. Now his third novel, John of John, is an Oprah Book Club pick. He still finds it strange.
“I had always felt very outside the literary community in Britain,” Stuart says. “I didn’t know the right people, I didn’t study the right way. But I can’t claim that anymore because I’m squarely on the inside.” Does he feel that? “I don’t feel it at all but objectively I can’t say I’m an underdog anymore.”
