s a boy in working-class Glasgow, one of the ways Douglas Stuart learned to cope with his alcoholic mother’s mood swings was to pretend to write her memoir. They never got very far, but it always began with the dedication: “To Elizabeth Taylor, who knows nothing about love.” And so the seeds were sown for his debut novel Shuggie Bain, which was awarded the Booker prize this week. “I never thought, using that trick 40 years ago, I’d be here talking to you about my book,” the author says on a Zoom call from New York, where he has lived for the last 20 years. Instead of the usual smart dinner at London’s Guildhall (Barack Obama made an appearance at the virtual ceremony), Stuart is tucking into a plate of ham and cheese his husband has made for him. He may have a celebratory glass of champagne later. “All these wonderful things keep happening and I’ve never left the sofa,” he says of life in lockdown. He is “blown away” by his win, beating acclaimed authors including Maaza Mengiste for her epic novel The Shadow King and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. Much has been made of the diversity of this year’s shortlist. As Stuart points out, Shuggie Bain is “a diverse novel”, its win “a great thing for Scottish voices, for queer voices, for working-class voices”. He is only the second Scot to win the Booker, following James Kelman for How Late It Was, How Late in 1994, which is on the bookshelf behind him in his elegant East Village apartment, a world away from the housing estates on which he grew up. The novel took him 10 years to write and was rejected by 32 publishers. The American publisher to which he first sent the manuscript was worried about finding a readership for a book about 1980s Scotland. “No one here had any idea what Thatcher did,” he says. “We are watching The Crown right now, and Margaret Thatcher and the government feel like very forthright, powerful people who are making things happen.” Like Shuggie, Stuart’s mother died from alcoholism when he was 16, but he is at pains to stress that this is a work of fiction: “It dwarfs and eclipses what any seven-year-old boy could go through.” Poverty, misogyny, homophobia, addiction and sectarianism are all touched upon but, above all, this is a love story between a mother and her son. “It is about the tested unconditional love, that sort of daily renewal of hope, that only children can have for flawed parents,” he says. Both Shuggie and his mother Agnes are outsiders. “Agnes because women weren’t allowed to be anything other than what the community said they should be. And Shuggie because he’s a young queer boy, he’s effeminate and men don’t know what to do with him,” Stuart explains. “They are sort of marooned and clinging to each other against this city that is going through a really tough time.” This is the era of cassette tapes and endless cigarettes, closed mines and “men rotting into the settee”, women trading Valium, vodka and everyday brutalities. “You can’t set a book in 80s Glasgow and not touch on politics,” he says. “It is so interwoven with how people felt unseen and how they didn’t have any hope.” (Ken Loach sent him a fan letter.) But he didn’t want it to become a book “about the miners’ strikes or a tin-pail lunchbox shipbuilding novel”. From the fiction of Agnes Owens to Kelman to Irvine Welsh, there is no shortage of male addicts and “lovable rogues” in Scottish literature. But Stuart wanted to write about the effects poverty had on women and children, by focusing on the tragedy of a single mother and her son. “When women are fallible, and of course mothers are fallible, society is really hard on them,” he says. Living in New York gave him the distance and clarity he needed to start writing. He wrote on the subway and during weekends and holidays, all the while working at a “very demanding job in a huge American fashion brand”. His only reader was his husband, Michael Cary, a Picasso specialist and curator at the Gagosian, whom he presented with a 900-page manuscript. And whom he married after more than two decades together at a ceremony at New York city hall the day he signed with the US publisher Grove Atlantic. “Growing up as the boy I was and now the man that I am in New York, they feel like two very different people. And so, though this is on-the-back-of-a-cornflakes-box psychology, it was a good way for me to make sense of the whole of me and to sort of stitch myself together,” he says. “I love the boy I was. It wasn’t always easy but I wanted to conjure that world.” He is unapologetic about the therapeutic nature of writing. “Fiction allows you take control of a situation that you might not have control over in real life.” He never wanted to write a memoir. “On the west coast of Scotland, we are never allowed to think of ourselves as exceptional – never exceptionally great or exceptionally hard done to,” he says. “And a memoir is thinking there’s an exception there that is worth sharing.” He was acutely aware of writing “poverty safari” for a largely middle-class readership. “People like to come through for a tour and then they go back to worrying about oat milk,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well if we are going to do that, then you are coming for a stay.’ We are going to look at a woman drinking. You are going to be in the room with these people to the extent that you are going to leave the book with some sense of understanding them.” In his childhood home, the closest things to books were shelves of vinyl mock-ups of classic books that were actually video cases – “you’d open it and there’d be a Betamax,” he laughs. Books can be “quite a dangerous thing” for some young boys, he thinks, “because you’ve got to be out there showing you are hard. And they can be hurtful because you never see yourself in the pages.” He is grateful to two English teachers, “who just saw this boy who was struggling and said, ‘Here. Read this!’” The first novel he remembers reading was Tess of the d’Urbervilles when he was 17. “In a funny way, I’ve written a Hardy novel just set in Glasgow,” he says. “How women are used by society.” But he credits the system with saving him. “There was a social fabric, a social net” to catch him when he fell through the cracks. Unlike the older men in his family, who had been “tossed aside by the trades they had put their faith in”, he had access to education. “I owe Scotland everything,” he says. Fear and determination drove him on to finish high school while living on his own in a hostel after his mother’s death. It took him through college where he studied textile design, before going on to become a knitwear designer and then vice-president of Banana Republic; quite a journey for a poor boy from Pollok. “There was no reverse gear,” he says. “There was nowhere to go back to.” And now he has been awarded one of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes for his first novel. He thought he had written a historical novel, but the events of this year have given the book a new urgency. “There’s a whole chapter on free school meals and then in 2020 there are headlines about a sports star having to tell the government to feed kids in the middle of a pandemic,” he says of footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign. He has already completed his second novel, a love story about two boys across the sectarian divide, again set in Glasgow but a decade after Shuggie Bain. He is working on his third, which grew out of a road trip he took in the Outer Hebrides last year. “I’m always writing about loneliness and belonging and love,” he says. “That’s what keeps me coming back to the page.” He is hoping to give up the day job to become a full-time writer – something that surely will be easier now. His mother taught him to knit to keep him quiet, and it is not lost on him that she sparked his interest in textiles and writing, “the two things that have been such a big part of my life”. The best thing about the novel’s success, he says, is the way in which it has connected with readers. “Whether from Detroit or Innerleithen, when people say, ‘Ah – I went through something like this.’” Trauma is something he thinks “we just don’t talk about in society, which stops so many people getting help and feeling sane. I’m glad Shuggie can do that.”