Booker Prize 2020: Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart wins for ‘Shuggie Bain’
Stuart is second Scot to win literary honour
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Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart has won the 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel Shuggie Bain.
Stuart was crowned the winner during a special ceremony at London’s Roundhouse on Thursday. The event included contributions from the Duchess of Cornwall, former US president Barack Obama, and past Booker Prize winners Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Bernardine Evaristo.
Published in February this year, Shuggie Bain is based on the author’s childhood and has been billed by the Booker as “a searing account of a young boy growing up in Thatcher’s Glasgow of the 1980s, with a mother who is battling addiction”.
Stuart, 44, dedicated the novel to his mother, who died of alcoholism when the author was 16.
Margaret Busby, the 2020 chair of judges, said the novel is “destined to be a classic”, describing it as “a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values”.
“Gracefully and powerfully written, this is a novel that has impact because of its many emotional registers and its compassionately realised characters,” Busby said.
“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 make you laugh – a daring, frightening and life-changing novel.”
Stuart is the second Scot to win the prize. The first was James Kelman, who won in 1994 with How late it was, how late. Stuart previously described Kelman’s novel as a life-changing influence in an interview for the Booker Prize’s website.
“It is such a bold book, the prose and stream of consciousness is really inventive,” Stuart said at the time. “But it is also one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page.”
The author is now finishing his second novel, Loch Awe, also set in Glasgow. In addition to the £50,000 prize, he receives a trophy, a designer-bound edition of his book and an additional £2,500 for being shortlisted.
Also shortlisted for this year’s prize were Diane Cook for The New Wilderness, Tsitsi Dangarembga for This Mournable Body, Avni Doshi for Burnt Sugar, Maaza Mengiste for The Shadow King, and Brandon Taylor for Real Life.
Last year’s Booker prize went jointly to Atwood (for The Testaments) and Evaristo (for Girl, Woman, Other).
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