corner of my desk and crack on with other things.” The kernel of the idea for Young Mungo came during the height of the #MeToo movement as “we were reckoning with some dark things in societ about sexual violence and I thought, we don’t get enough of men’s voices when men have been the victim”. He adds: “Mungo was a way to explore masculinit and how we teach litle boys how to be men, how we ask them to ‘man up’. It’s also a non-linear conversation with Shuggie. It’s not a sequel, but I’m sort of building my world, my milieu. I’m trying to go deeper into conversations about masculinit, sexualit, povert, about the limits of [social] mobilit, about what it means to belong, what it means to try and build a family when your family is coming apart around you. The bravery of tender- ness. These are things that interest me as a writer.”


I’m trying to go deeper into conversations about masculinity, sexuality, poverty, about the limits of [social] mobility


herself for years, but she died suddenly one day when I was at school. And I thought I needed to cobble together some kind of education. So almost everybody leſt school, as they went off aſter 16 to get work, and I went from being in a class of 300 kids to 12. In English, I was essentially in classes of one and I had two phenomenal teachers who started puting great works in front of me. Nothing that really deviated much from the syllabus, but it was fantastic to have someone to read with. And that’s when it really unlocked my joy of reading.” He had started in earnest on his English studies far too


late, so studying it at universit was not on the cards. But he was always interested in fashion design and was adept at sewing, so he studied at the Scotish College of Textiles (now part of Heriot-Wat Universit) and, aſter a masters at the Royal College of Art, he was recruited by Calvin Klein and brought over to New York in 2000, beginning what would become a 20-year career in fashion.


In vogue


Scottish blood Young Mungo is suffused with a Scotishness, a Weegie- ness, but it is a kind of hardscrabble story that is still not oſten represented in Scotish fiction, and definitely not in VisitScotland adverts. The book opens with Mungo being packed off by his mother on a fishing trip with a couple of very dodgy fellas in order to teach him to be more of a man. As the bus leaves Glasgow, Stuart writes that Mungo, in “15 years he had lived and breathed in Scotland... had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest or a ruined castle”. This reflects Stuart’s own experience: “I never saw a loch until I was a teenager, I never saw a sheep in real life and these things were 30 miles from where I was born. One of the most heartbreaking things for me was when I moved to America when I was 24, people would ask me where I was from. When I answered ‘Scotland’ they would say: ‘Oh, I love the Isle of Harris!’ Or it would be Loch Lomond or St Andrews. And I had never been to any of those places. But that’s really a conversation about povert. So, my connection with my own country, especially the beautiful wilderness of it, was always really only on a biscuit tin.” Stuart was born in 1976 and grew up in sometimes very


straitened circumstances in Glasgow’s famously hard Sighthill housing estate. His father abandoned the family when Stuart was young and he and his two brothers were raised by their mother, who batled alcoholism and addiction all her life. He knew that world of sectarianism and violence very well, though he was never in a gang. “I was on the periphery and I was close enough to see it. But I was always in a big swirling group of boys where I still had to kiss girls and be violent and disruptive.” Stuart’s mother died when he was 16; obviously a time of great pain but it also coincided with a flowering of his love for books. He previously did not read much for pleasure—not that he did not love stories, but there were simply no books in their flat. He says: “Books just weren’t for the likes of us. But I really discovered the power of literature aſter my mother died. She had been killing


TheBookseller.com


Though his time in fashion was sometimes frustrating, it helped his career as a writer. Even as the rejections kept rolling in for Shuggie Bain (“I think my agent stopped forwarding me the emails from publishers aſter about the 20th, as she saw how much they crushed me”), it helped him stay true to his vision: “Because I was working in fashion at the time, I had a career, this thing where I was proven and could demonstrate that I was successful. So I never had any compulsion to change the book… it was going to be the book I wanted, or it was not going to happen. Also, fashion taught me about the commerce of art—I was seeing a lot of the rejection come from the point of view of, ‘We don’t know how to sell this,’ not necessarily about what I had writen.” Stuart is now something of a Scotish national hero. The second Scot to win a Booker (aſter James Kelman in 1994), Shuggie Bain was 2020’s Waterstones Scotish Book of the Year and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon recently called him “one of the greats of Scotish literature”. But he has not lived in Scotland for two decades. The obvious ques- tion to an expat: will he ever go home? “Glasgow is my home. I don’t live there physically, don’t pay a landlord. But I go back all the time and my family are still there. It’s my spiritual home, my emotional home. Every outlook I have about things, even today, comes from my Glaswegian upbringing. And it’s a fascinating cit because it was a cit that went through such an enormous amount of upheaval and met it with really interesting humanit.”


Metadata


Imprint Picador Publication 14.04.22 Format HB (£16.99), EB (£8.99), audio (£13.99) ISBN 9781529068764/ 795/801 Rights Picador (UK & Commonwealth), Grove Atlantic (US), Knopf Canada and 12 others Editor Ravi Mirchandani Agent Anna Stein, ICM (Lucy Luck, C&W)


Stuart’s working- class heroes


Agnes Owens The Complete Novellas Birlinn, £14.99, 9781846975608 “We never talk enough about Owens, a fascinating writer full of humanity who worked as a cleaning lady until the day she died. A personal hero of mine.”


George Friel A Glasgow Trilogy Canongate, £20, 9780862418854 “He wrote amazing social portraits of Glasgow tenements in the 1950s and ’60s. Grace and Mrs Partridge [included in A Glasgow Trilogy] is my favourite, a really spooky, phenomenal book.”


Alan Warner Morvern Callar Vintage, £7.99, 9781784870102 “It had an enormous effect on me as a young man, because it was such an honest portrait of a working- class woman who felt stuck in her life and even when she did horrible things I thought, ‘Yeah, I understand that’.”


Janice Galloway The Trick is to Keep Breathing Vintage, £9.99, 9781784870133 “It absolutely blows me away every time I read it.”


read it.


JANICE GALLOWAY 09


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