LONDON — The Booker Prize has gone to a debut novel that thirty publishers turned down. Douglas Stuart, a 44-year-old Scottish-American fashion designer, won the 2020 prize on Thursday night for “Shuggie Bain”, his autobiographically inspired story of a boy growing up in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic mother.
The novel, a decade in the writing, follows young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain through the housing schemes and the miners’ strike of Thatcher-era Glasgow, caring for his mother Agnes as her drinking destroys the family. Stuart has said Agnes is drawn from his own mother, who died of alcoholism when he was 16.
He is only the second Scottish writer to win the prize, after James Kelman in 1994 — a win that itself caused uproar over Kelman’s Glaswegian vernacular. Stuart thanked Kelman in his speech, saying the earlier novel had changed his life by showing him that people like him could exist in literature.
The ceremony, like everything this year, was virtual: the announcement came from a near-empty Roundhouse in London, with the shortlisted authors on screens. Margaret Busby, chair of the judges, praised a novel that she said would be read for decades.
The win completes a publishing fairytale. Stuart wrote the book in his spare time while working in New York fashion; the rejections piled up before a small American publisher took it. On Friday morning, “Shuggie Bain” was the most talked-about novel in Britain.
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