Douglas Stuart and Jackie Kay at Contact

The latest event in the Manchester Literature Festival spring programme welcomes Booker Prize-winning author Douglas Stuart to launch his eagerly anticipated new novel, chatting to Manchester Literature Festival patron, poet and fellow Glaswegian Jackie Kay.

Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize, the Fiction Debut Award and the overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards.

Set in Glasgow in the 1990s, Young Mungo is the deeply moving story of the dangerous first love of two young men and their dream to escape the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of the city’s housing estates. About the push and pull of family, the painful traps of poverty, addiction and inequality, the dangers of being different, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the resilience of the human spirit, the new novel is described as “gripping and powerful” and is written with the same warmth, dark humour and compassion as Douglas’s debut, Shuggie Bain.

Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize, the Fiction Debut Award and the overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, and has been translated into 38 languages. It was written over a 10-year period and Douglas is currently working on the script for the television adaptation of Shuggie Bain, to be directed by Olivier and Tony Award-winning Stephen Daldry.

Having been born and raised in Glasgow, Douglas went to London to study at the Royal College of Art, then moved to New York where he began a career in fashion design – living and working there since 2000, he now considers himself a Scottish-American writer. His short stories Found Wanting and The Englishman were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essay Poverty, Anxiety, and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature was published by Lit Hub.

This event is presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing, Creative Manchester and Waterstones Deansgate – Young Mungo will be available on the bookstall.