Douglas Stuart

Worked as a fashion designer in New York for twenty years and wrote Shuggie Bain in the evenings, over ten of them, without telling many people.

It follows a boy in 1980s Glasgow trying and failing to save his mother from alcoholism through Thatcher's deindustrialisation. Thirty-two publishers rejected it. It won the Booker in 2020.

Young Mungo went back to the same city for a love story between two boys on opposite sides of the sectarian line. Stuart writes poverty from inside it and refuses to make it picturesque, and the tenderness in the books is what makes the rest survivable.