Douglas Stuart wins 2020 Booker Prize; Avni Doshi misses out

Scottish author Douglas Stuart, whose debut novel ‘Shuggie Bain’ described a boy rising up in Glasgow within the 1980s with a mom battling habit, has received the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction from a six-member shortlist that included Indian-origin author Avni Doshi’s ‘Burnt Sugar’.

The awards ceremony was broadcast on BBC with the six authors becoming a member of just about. The occasion included messages from former US President Barack Obama, the Duchess of Cornwall and former Booker winners Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo.

Stuart, 44, who received the £50,000 prize after being introduced the winner by chair of the judges Margaret Busby, delivered an acceptance speech and obtained a trophy, a designer-bound version of his e-book and an additional £2,500 for being shortlisted.

Based on his personal childhood, Stuart’s e-book is described as a searing account of the boy rising up in Thatcher’s Glasgow. He devoted the e-book to his personal mom, who died of alcoholism when he was 16.

After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York to start out a profession in vogue design, and began writing in his spare time a decade in the past. His work has since appeared in LitHub and in The New Yorker, which has printed two of his brief tales this yr. He is at present ending his second novel, Loch Awe, additionally set in Glasgow.

Busby, editor, literary critic and former writer, stated: “‘Shuggie Bain is destined to be a classic — a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values. The heart-wrenching story tells of the unconditional love between Agnes Bain — set on a descent into alcoholism by the tough circumstances life has dealt her — and her youngest son”.

“Shuggie struggles with responsibilities beyond his years to save his mother from herself, at the same time as dealing with burgeoning feelings and questions about his own otherness. Gracefully and powerfully written, this is a novel that has impact because of its many emotional registers and its compassionately realised characters”, she added.

Obama said in his message: “I’ve all the time turned to writing to make sense of our world … And at their finest Booker Prize listed books remind me of fiction’s energy to place ourselves in another person’s footwear, perceive their struggles, and picture new methods to deal with advanced issues and impact change”.

The 2020 shortlist was: The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications); This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber); Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House); The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books); Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan); Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing).

First awarded in 1969, The Booker Prize is taken into account one of many main prizes for literary fiction written in English. The listing of former winners options a number of of the literary giants of the final 5 a long time: from Iris Murdoch to Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro to Hilary Mantel.