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‘Bloody hell, if I’d had his childhood, I would have just curled into a ball and given up.” That was my first thought after I finished interviewing Douglas Stuart. Thankfully, he is made of

tougher stuff. He has taken the trauma and turmoil of his early years and turned it into a heartbreaking novel, a book both beautiful and brutal. His debut, _Shuggie Bain_, this week won

Britain’s most important literary prize, the Booker. I’m glad it won. Misery likes company, so let’s talk about his childhood. Don’t worry, it’s not just a story of Ken Loach-ish gloom; it’s

also a tale of accomplishment. Stuart was born in Sighthill, a large housing estate in Glasgow, in 1976. His father walked out when Stuart was four and died when he was eight. He was “that

bastard down the road”, according to his mother. He saw his father once between the ages of four and eight. So he, and his older brother and sister, were brought up by his mother. Yet as

Stuart puts it, “When I was 16 my mother died. It wasn’t unexpected. She died of her addiction.” His mother was an alcoholic. “From the age of four or five, alcohol was just a fact of life

for me,” he tells me over Zoom; he is at home, in New York’s East Village. “She was not always drunk, but alcoholism was always something she suffered from and it worsened as I grew older.

Some days she might just be late picking you up from school. Other days it would be an absolute catastrophe. Bad for her, terrifying for us.” Along with his mother’s addiction and his

family’s poverty — Stuart cannot remember his mother ever working and they relied on benefits — he had another burden to carry. “When I was six, a gang of boys turned to me in the classroom

and said, ‘Why are you such a little poof?’ It stuck and that was my narrative for the next ten years,” he says. Glasgow in the 1980s was not a kind place for gay children and he was

bullied. He was by his own admission a tired and lonely adolescent. “All I wanted was a friend, someone to talk to. At the age of 17 I’d write these incredibly long-winded, soul-searching,

romantic letters replying to the personal ads in the back of newspapers. Mortifying now!” Advertisement All that grief and sadness and misery has been turned into something tough, tender and

beautifully sad, _Shuggie Bain_. “There is nothing more healing than turning trauma into art. The best therapy for myself was to take all the trauma of my childhood and write about it,”

Stuart says, though he is at pains to point out that the book is fiction, not memoir. The novel, dedicated to his mother (“I miss her every day, you always have the grief” ), tells the story

of Shuggie, a sensitive boy growing up in Glasgow, from the ages of five to fifteen. He lives with his mother, Agnes. She is a defiant, beautiful woman, but also an alcoholic with a

destructive taste in men. It is the story of a boy, bullied and buffeted by events, trying to grow up in a hostile world, and the chronicle of the slow, painful disintegration of a woman.

You root for both characters, hoping that they find peace and happiness. It is also rich in a sense of place, the gritty streets of Glasgow and Lanarkshire, and the unemployment-battered

times. And the dialogue zings with the rhythms of Scots dialect and slang. Gallus — “absolute self-confidence, where you think you’re the bee’s knees” — is the word he most hopes will find a

wider audience. Although dark, in its own way it is a love story. “Shuggie is about unconditional love truly because it is about love that has been tested all the time,” Stuart says. “It is

a particular kind of love that only children can have for flawed parents, partly because children never know anything else. Children are such beautifully resilient, accepting creatures

because they deal with what is in front of them, and they don’t necessarily expect something different. They just plough on.” And Stuart, a socialist, also wanted to give a voice to those

who live at rock-bottom. “I didn’t want it to be a gawp at poverty or addiction. I didn’t want to let the reader off with some sort of poverty safari. I really wanted them to be in the room

with Agnes, to see what it is like to live with addiction,” he says. Advertisement I suspect that most of us would be furious if we had been dealt his hand. “I’m not angry at all. I wouldn’t

want Shuggie to be seen as an angry book. It’s just life, and you don’t get a choice,” he says in a soft Glaswegian burr. He would be perfect for doing voiceovers for house insurance

adverts; you trust the guy. Anyway, he credits his childhood with giving him “a large amount of self-reliance, determination. I’m incredibly resilient and focused. I see that a lot of my

peers don’t have those things — not knowing the keen edge of need, the fear of having no safety net. Those are the positive things of the way I grew up.” He admits to still having the habits

of a poor person. “I am incredibly frugal. I don’t waste any money. I don’t buy anything on credit.” Thanks to that resilience — and the help of others (good old grants; “the support of the

nation”, as he puts it.) — he made something with his life. At 16, he rented a room, working on the tills at a supermarket, while he finished his schooling. He became the first from his

family to leave school with qualifications. He had no particular interest in textiles, but his teachers suggested it as a trade that might suit a boy with a creative bent. So first he

studied at the Scottish College of Textiles in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. “One of the reasons why I chose it was because the male-to-female ratio was 15 women to every man. I think

after Glasgow, after the bullying, I wanted this safe space.” He describes his time there as “incredibly healing because I had a lot of support from female energy. I think as a gay man, you

have to spend a lot of time dealing with the self-loathing that other people teach you to have. It wasn’t as if I was naturally inclined to hate myself, but as a young man I was left with a

lot of that.” Advertisement An MA in menswear design at the Royal College of Art followed. “I didn’t have a plan; it was all about survival, about keeping going.” Then in 2000 he was spotted

by a talent scout for Calvin Klein. And it was off to New York, where he still lives. Along the way he has picked up a husband, Michael Cary, a curator at the Gagosian art gallery. However,

being a luxury designer for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren didn’t sit well with him. “I didn’t know why I was so unhappy — I had the career that all my peers in fashion college were dreaming

of. But I couldn’t go into work every day and create things that were out of reach of the people I love.” He was from a world where you feed 50 pence pieces into the telly to make it work.

So he went to super-democratic, affordable Gap, becoming a senior design director. Yet he wanted to write; he describes it as his “furloughed dream”. Which is unexpected for a boy who “grew

up in a house with absolutely no books. I think we had one copy of _Flowers in the Attic_.” He points out that “in working-class communities books are seen as feminine because they contain

thoughts and feelings. To carry a book around with me or to curl up with a book was not something that I could do. Having the peace to read only came to me after my mother’s death, after

high school. It takes a lot of peace inside yourself, as well as your environment, to be able to sink into a book.” He says: “Writing was something that my mother taught me to do. One of the

tricks, when my mum was spiralling into drink, to distract her and keep her safe and stop her from stoating around town at night, was to say, ‘How about I write your memoir?’” Advertisement

His mother was always fascinated with Elizabeth Taylor, a star worshipped for being unlucky in love, who led a calamitous life, but was defiant in not caring about the judgments of others.

“My mother thought of herself as being similar so I used to sit down and try to write her memoir, but we never got past the dedication. The dedication was always the same: ‘To Elizabeth

Taylor, who thinks she does, but knows nothing about the cruelties of love.’” In 2008 he started writing. Unlike most new novelists, he has never taken a creative writing course. “Everything

I’ve done I’ve taught myself and took my time,” he says. He describes the writing process as being “incredibly healing and personal”. By chance, he met a woman who used to work in

publishing at a party. He did that thing that strikes terror into the heart of all off-duty publishers and told her that he had written a novel. “She looked cornered and wanted to get away.

I was all enthusiasm, and she was all horror,” he says, laughing about his naivety. Nonetheless she read it and told him that he really did have a book. That was in 2017. Three years later

it is published on both sides of the Atlantic. When he discovered in July that he had been longlisted for the Booker, he went “from being super-elated to suddenly, ‘Oh God, what if I let

Scotland down?’ It’s part of my national guilt, I suppose,” he says, laughing. “Writing the book was finding my way home and connecting two parts of me. The boy I was and the man I am are

quite far apart. I wanted to tie them together. I am always looking for a way home to Scotland.” I hope he gets there. Advertisement _SHUGGIE BAIN _BY DOUGLAS STUART IS PUBLISHED BY PICADOR