Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. It took my guest today more than 10

years to write his first novel. It took him another two years to find a publisher willing to put it

into print, but the patience and the persistence paid off for Douglas Stewart. His novel, Shuggy

Bain, won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction last year.

It was the culmination of an extraordinary journey for the author. His fictional story about a boy

growing up in Glasgow amid poverty, family breakup and relentless bullying has clear parallels with

his own life. Like the fictional Shuggy, Douglas

Stewart was raised by a loving mother who sank into alcohol addiction and died young. Douglas, too,

was bullied for being different, gay, in an overwhelmingly macho culture. Unlike most of his peers in the poorest neighborhoods of post-industrial

Glasgow, Douglas moved on and moved out. By his mid-20s, he was a textile designer in New York

City, but he longed to write and in the end devoted himself to a story which took him back to where he

came from. Now in his mid-40s, he is a

full-time writer in New York with a screenplay and new novels in the works, but is he still drawn

back to the Scotland which he left behind? Well, Douglas Stewart joins me from New York State

now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Hi, Stephen. Thank you for having me.

It is a great pleasure to have you on the show.

Douglas, I think people right around the world are still discovering your extraordinary novel, Shuggy Bain.

They may be surprised to learn that it took you pretty much a decade, maybe a little bit more than a

decade, to actually complete this novel. Now that makes it sound like it was very difficult to

write. Was it difficult? It was at times quite difficult to write because it draws on a lot of

experience from my own life. But like many writers, I had to juggle the writing of it

...