‘I’m grateful for my mother’s struggle’

‘Honestly, I think my soul left my body,” says Douglas Stuart, when asked about his immediate reaction to the announcement, via a Zoom ceremony, of course, that he’d won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain. It’s an autobiographical working-class novel set largely in Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s on a post-industrial council estate in Glasgow during the grim time of the mines and steel mills closing, an imminent drug epidemic, and where rain is the prevailing state that keeps the people pale and bronchial.

Glasgow-born Stuart, who’s on the phone from his home in New York where he’s lived for the past 20 years, says the first thing he did after hearing the news was thank his husband, Picasso specialist