'Shuggie Bain' writer Douglas Stuart wins 2020 Booker Prize
Douglas Stuart won the coveted literary award for his book titled 'Shuggie Bain', which narrates the story of a boy's turbulent coming of age in hardscrabble 1980s Glasgow in the Uniked Kingdom.
FollowStuart won the coveted literary award for his book titled 'Shuggie Bain', which narrates the story of a boy's turbulent coming of age in hardscrabble 1980s Glasgow in the Uniked Kingdom.
Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York City, where he began a career in fashion design.
His work has appeared in the New Yorker and on LitHub.
According to the Booker Prize jury, 'laying bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride, Shuggie Bain is a blistering and heartbreaking debut, and an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents'.
After winning the 50,000 Pound (Rs 49.2 lakh), Stuart took to Twitter to say: "I am so grateful to Booker Prize and the judges for selecting Shuggie Bain as the 2020 Booker winner. It's difficult to express what this honour means in a tweet. So I'm googling skywriters, and I'll let youse know when to look up. Thank you to everyone who has sent such supportive messages about Shuggie today. You got me right in the feels. As soon as we can have house parties again, I have an empty, and youse are all invited."
In an interview after being named in the Booker shortlist, Stuart described why he chose to base his book about his hometown Glasgow: "The characters in Shuggie Bain couldn't exist anywhere else; Glasgow is as much in their blood as it is in mine. When you come from a place of such strong character -- oppressive, resilient, loving, hilarious, aggressive, maddening -- it shapes who you are for the rest of your life. Childhood in Glasgow was tough, and distance certainly helped me to distill the story out of my experiences of the city. That distance brought clarity but it also allowed me to fall in love with the city again."
Margaret Busby, who chaired the judging panel, said Shuggie Bain was destined to be a classic. She called it intimate and gripping, challenging but hopeful in its exploration of young Shuggie’s complex but loving relationship between mother and son.
Here's an excerpt from 'Shuggie Bain' read by actor Stuart Campbell
