Hay 2023 Picks: Douglas Stuart in conversation with Dua Lipa
‘Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, give a platform to working-class, queer experiences, adding depth and diversity to the genre of queer writing.’
It’s not often that you see a global pop star at a literary event, but Dua Lipa, founder of Service 95 and its new book club, is an avid reader, and is using her huge platform to encourage and celebrate reading. Shuggie Bain is the first of her book groups’ picks and she invites Douglas Stuart to talk all things Shuggie in a live recording of her podcast.
Jack Edwards welcomes Dua and Douglas to the stage to discuss Shuggie Bain, a grim and moving portrait of boyhood in 1980s Glasgow that won the Booker Prize in 2020. Douglas has an incredibly warm presence and gratuitous nature, appearing very thankful for all of his supporters and readers. He recounts the writing of Shuggie, revisiting his own childhood from amid his new life in the fashion industry in New York, which was a painful process that took him a staggering ten years.
Queer literature has so often been dominated by privileged voices, Douglas says, whereas his novels, Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, give a platform to working-class, queer experiences, adding depth and diversity to the genre of queer writing. Young Mungo was written immediately after Shuggie Bain, before it found publication – for which it was rejected many times as, astoundingly, publishers were worried it wouldn’t find an audience.
Dua came equipped with an astute selection of questions, many offered up by a reading group at HMP Downview Women’s Prison, where she discussed the novel with a selection of the inmates. Books Unlocked, is the Booker Prize’s partnership with the National Literacy Trust, which encourages the UK’s prison population to engage with literature.
Despite a few off-tone questions from the Dua Lipa mega fans in the audience, the conversation was warm, mutually supportive, and an engaging in-depth discussion of the brilliant Shuggie Bain – overall, a real insight.
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