Douglas Stuart hopes Booker win helps working-class writers

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Stuart won the 50,000-pound literary award for “Shuggie Bain,” the powerful story of a boy coming of age with an alcoholic mother in poverty-scarred 1980s Glasgow It’s an astonishing feat for a first novel that took a decade to write and was rejected by 32 publishers before finding a home. He said that in his childhood “books were never seen as ‘for people like us’ because they never contained people like us.” “The thing that’s defining about ‘Shuggie Bain’ is it’s a working-class family who are slipping through the fabric of society, and we don’t often get to hear those kinds of voices,” Stuart said in a gentle Scottish burr. “It’s good to have Scottish voices have a moment of support, and it’s great to see queer writers also," said Stuart, who lives in New York with his American husband. Publisher and editor Margaret Busby, who chaired the Booker judging panel, said the book’s emotional range and ability to convey “compassion without pity” made it likely to become a classic.