Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author, born in Glasgow in 1976. His debut novel Shuggie Bain (2020), a semi-autobiographical story of a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow, won the Booker Prize. His work - exploring class, queerness and family - has been translated into more than forty languages. Alongside writing, he spent years working as a fashion designer in New York City, where he still lives.
John of John is on the longlist of the Booker Prize 2026, with which Stuart as a former winner is nominated again for the most prestigious English-language literary prize.
Stuart's third novel John of John was published on 5 May 2026 by Grove Press; the book is set on the Scottish island of Harris in the late nineties and is also nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Stuart described his three novels Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo and John of John as a 'loose triptych'.
Stuart spoke live on the stage of Intelligence Squared in February 2025 about his literary work and the upcoming TV adaptations of his novels by A24 and the BBC.
Shuggie Bain was named by The Sunday Times as one of the best novels of the twenty-first century and by the Daily Telegraph counted among the ten best Booker Prize winners of all time.
