Booker winner Douglas Stuart: From penniless teenager to literary toast of 2020

On Wednesday, the night before the winner of the Booker Prize was announced, Douglas Stuart’s husband Michael bet him £50,000 he would win; Stuart was convinced he wouldn’t. "So now I owe him £50,000," says Stuart, with a laugh, "which is fine by me.".You believe him, too. Stuart does not strike you as the sort to splash his winnings on a yacht. Born in Glasgow, but resident of New York for the last two decades (he has been a US citizen for many years), he was by some distance the favourite to win this year’s prize for Shuggie Bain, his heart-stopping semi-autobiographical account of a small boy growing up with his alcoholic mother in recession-ravaged Eighties Scotland..Now 44, he may have reinvented himself as a highly successful fashion designer, working for luxury New York brands such as Calvin Klein, and living in a book-lined apartment in the East Village with his American partner, a Picasso specialist at the Gagosian art gallery..But, to some degree, he is still the little boy who, from the age of seven, sneaked money from his mother’s benefits to ensure the two of them could eat. "You never change that attitude," he says. "People who come from nothing either go mad when they come into money, or they become very miserly. Unfortunately, I’m the guarded sort. I know the value of it.".Stuart’s journey from child of a single mother to the literary toast of 2020 is a story worthy of a Netflix TV show. His father left home when he was four, and he saw him again just once before he died, when Stuart was eight. He spent an erratic childhood – detailed with agonising love in the novel – barely at school, instead trying to keep his desperately proud, beautiful, heartbroken mum off the booze and away from the predatory men who would ply her with alcohol..When she died, he was just 16. His older brother and sister had long left home, and his options, as a penniless teenager working all hours in a supermarket and living in a bedsit by himself, were few.."I knew I had to finish high school because I knew there were so few jobs," he said. "I also knew what it looks like to get a wage packet on a Friday and it be gone by Tuesday. So I buckled down. I wanted to study English, but I hadn’t really read a book until I was 17, so my teachers steered me towards textiles because it was an employable trade.."Everyone thinks of fashion as this big, glamorous thing with a capital F, but I spent a long time simply learning how to knit. Other kids were going home for Christmas or having a gap year and discovering themselves, but I didn’t have the option to discover myself. I just had to keep going. That’s one of the benefits of where I come from: when you don’t have the comfort of money, you have to push through.".The resilience of the community he details in Shuggie Bain, the determination of people who have nothing, yet each day, somehow, keep on going, was embedded deep within him, too. It paid off: at his Royal College of Art degree show, he was scouted by Calvin Klein and offered a job in New York. Frankly, he says, anyone could have offered him work and he would have taken it; instead, he found himself barely out of his teens alone in the Big Apple.."I was so homesick. I’m still homesick. No one in New York cares about your feelings. You either perform and power through, or you don’t, because there is always someone else who wants that position.".Yet, in many ways, moving to New York was a liberation. From a young age, Stuart had been trying and failing to conform amid the rigid masculine codes of a proud, working-class community that he knew in his heart contained no place for him.."I’d do anything as a kid to conceal the fact I was effeminate and fey, because it was such a dangerous place to be," he says. "Even being seen to read a book could betray you.".As he got older, he realised something else, too. "People in the UK cannot help but have expectations of people before they even open their mouth," he says. "They assume they know everything about you, your education attainment, your background, what circles you move in, and if you are a gay, working-class man, that can be a very paralysing... but New York and America reward people who want to succeed and it gives them a fair shot.."Even when Shuggie Bain was published, it was notable how in the UK the reception was a lot about class and about me as a writer, whereas in the States no one was interested in me at all, but only whether the novel was any good." It took him 10 years to write Shuggie, fitting it in when he could around 14-hour working days (he compares the art of stitching to that of writing). It took so long not because it was so difficult to write, but because he loved writing it so much. You can feel the latter on every page: it’s a terrific read, unflinching in its descriptions of poverty and addiction – young Shuggie would play with his mother’s empty Tennent’s cans in the bath – but also saturated in a young boy’s desperate, devastating love for his mum. It’s a love letter to Glasgow’s working-class communities, but it’s also a love letter to her.."Women like my mother were never voiceless; they were driven, dynamic women, but they were just really limited by the society they found themselves in," he says. "We have a difficult time looking at addiction and poverty, society doesn’t know where to look, and when these people are women, it’s particularly difficult. We are very hard on fallible women, and women don’t know what to do with their hurt. So to put it on the page gives them some dignity.".Stuart considers himself very much working class. He eventually moved to head of menswear at Gap because he found the wealth-obsessed environment of luxury fashion was making him unhappy.."I had been this kid who only ever had clothes that came out of a catalogue; I was always aware of my mother paying a couple of pounds a week to pay for something she had bought a couple of years ago," he says. "Suddenly, I was in this rarefied world among glittering people who couldn’t make clothing that was expensive enough. Working at Gap, designing clothing for £20, I found the democracy I was looking for. Everything about my writing and my fashion world is like that – I’ve no desire to leave anyone behind.".He hasn’t left Scotland behind, far from it. "I’m always looking for ways to come back home," he says. "For one thing, my next two books are set there [one, a novel, is finished already]. But I’m also happy to exist on both sides of the Venn diagram where they overlap.."People sometimes want to know if I am a Scottish writer or an American writer, or a working-class writer or a gay writer, but the truth is I am all of those things, and hopefully a few other things, too.".Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is out now..The Daily Telegraph.Read more. Dubai-based Booker nominee Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar probes into the ‘most essential relationship’ An essential guide to the Booker Prize 2020 6 of the best female authors with male pen names