A longing for his home city led to Douglas Stuart writing a Booker Prize winning debut novel.

From his home in New York, where he spent the last 20 years working in the fashion industry, he was secretly writing the story of a boy growing up in Glasgow with an alcoholic mother.

The equally heartbreaking and heartwarming tale of Shuggie Bain took 12 years in total, partly because Douglas was snatching writing time at either end of a busy job and partly because he enjoyed immersing himself in his boyhood city and the Glaswegian characters he created.

While the book draws heavily on his own experience, it is, he says, a work of fiction and all the characters are imagined.

Speaking to the Glasgow Times, from his home in New York, Douglas said even after two decades across the Atlantic Ocean the pull of the city was so strong.

He said: “I’m home twice a year. I think distance brings a clarity but it also brought for me an awful lot of longing.

“It made me want to write these characters. I wanted to write about Glasgow because I felt a bit homesick as well and I wanted to create this on a page.”

The story he wanted to tell is one that he felt people outside Scotland didn’t really get.

He said: “Anywhere I’ve been as a Scotsman I felt people didn’t really know Glasgow or understand it, so part of the desire to write the book was about explaining myself and the people I grew up around and I’m not sure our story, the truth of what we all went through collectively if you grew up in a housing scheme, if you saw your brothers and the men around you lose their work and families started to come apart. People didn’t necessarily know that, because there is that stigma of ‘what are you telling people that for, keep your dirty washing at home’ sort of thing.”

The author has been coming back to Glasgow every year and has noticed the changes since the 1980s and 1990s that he was writing about.

But he had the desire to reflect those who haven’t shared in the improvements as much as others.

Douglas said: “It’s great to now see it looking so good and everyone with such a sense of positivity but then, personally, the reason I wrote Shuggie is that I feel people are often left behind or overlooked.

“There are still communities in Glasgow that will be feeling overlooked by this progress and there will still be housing schemes, that still, where people don’t feel like they have much at the moment.

“So ‘Shuggie’ fails if I say ‘Everything’s brilliant’. So it’s about the people who aren’t seen.”

His own story of leaving Glasgow is remarkable in itself. Having left to study textiles at Galashiels he then got a place at the Royal College of Art in London. At the end of his course recruiters from Calvin Klein interviewed his class and asked if he would like to go to New York.

Despite the difficult time he had in Glasgow he said he was in no desperate hurry to leave Glasgow.

He said: “The narrative is not that I was trying to get away from Glasgow. The narrative was that I was trying to get by. I felt just a wee bit untethered. When your parents are gone, where do you go at Christmas? Where do you go at summer? Where do you go?

“So I just had to work and be where I was and keep going. I was responsible for myself and so It was never about trying to get away from something.

“In fact most of my life has been about trying to come back to Glasgow. Writing Shuggie is about trying to come back, trying to connect myself back with the city where I’m from.”

The characters in his book are observed and formed from his own experiences, as he puts it: “ I was the queer son of a single mother who was suffering from addiction, so my entire world was women, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It was my mother and all of her friends, then all of the women she went to AA with.”

I was so almost excluded from the patriarchy, like boys very quickly knew I was different and other, and I was no good at football and all these other things, so my world was women and I loved that about Glasgow.

“I’ve always known the strength of the city to be its women because of that. I wanted to write a work of fiction that focused on a mother and focused on a young gay boy because that’s what I know about Glasgow.”

He grew up in Sighthill, and in the east end, and also went to school in Pollok at Crookston Castle Secondary, where he credits English and Art teachers with helping him, leading to college and a career.

He said he had support of siblings but admits “they can only do so much” so he worked four nights a week and every weekend to support himself through college.

He has favourite places he liked to visit and which remind him of home when he is New York.

He said: “My most favourite place actually is, I love the top of the necropolis. Especially on a winter’s day and you can smell the brewery at the bottom of the hill and you can just be up there by yourself.”

It is clear that his affection for Glasgow and his understanding of its people and their struggles of which he knows more than most, is a motivating factor.

He said: “I love Sighthill. I have good memories there. That’s the thing. People had a tough time but I felt an awful lot of love and a lot of good neighbours.

“It's not about good or bad people. It’s about good people going through bad times. That’s what it is.

“In the early 80s there was a really strong sense of community it was just the buildings around us were falling to bits.”