Booker prize winner Douglas Stuart: ‘Homophobia makes you think there’s something broken’

Growing up in 1980s Glasgow, Douglas Stuart was often told that there was something wrong with him. “It is hard in this modern world to make people understand how casual and everyday homophobia was then,” says the author of the magnificent novel Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize last week. “I grew up in what was quite a hard man’s world. I was ‘othered’ at about six years old, before I had any sense of a body or personality or who I am. I was like Shuggie, just a joyful creature going through the world and loving what he loves. There was nothing wrong with me, of course. I was effeminate, sensitive and precocious in the way that Shuggie is. It was adults and children who said, ‘There’s something not quite right about that wee boy.’”