Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart on the isolation of secret-keeping
5/4/202646 min
Like a number of his characters, Booker Prize-winning novelist Douglas Stuart grew up working class and queer in Glasgow. He went on to have a career in fashion, which plays into his latest novel, John of John. “It's hard to tell people about grief. It’s hard to talk to people about poverty... and so I’d got very used to the silence in my own life, and my writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself,” Stuart told Terry Gross.
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First 90 secondsErica Beras0:00
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Terry Gross· Host0:23
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. You may have read my guest's books. You may have worn the clothes he designed. Douglas Stuart's first novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize, which is one of the world's top literary awards. Much of it was written when Stuart was working in the fashion industry, designing clothes for popular brands like Calvin Klein and Banana Republic. Stuart wouldn't have predicted any of this from what his life was like growing up in a working class neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland in the '80s. He was raised by a single mother who was addicted to alcohol. Things weren't much better at school where he was relentlessly bullied. When he came to understand that he was gay, he didn't know anyone else who was. The novel Shuggie Bain tells a story very similar to Stuart's own childhood. Stuart has described his second novel, Young Mungo, as a story about the dangers of first love between two young working class men in Glasgow, and about masculinity, conformity, and falling in love. In our book critic Maureen Corrigan's review, she wrote, "It's hard