Douglas Stuart wins the 2020 Booker Prize
PEN International is delighted that the 2020 Booker Prize has been awarded to Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart.
Welcoming the news, PEN International’s Jennifer Clement said: “The books of the Booker Prize 2020 shortlist are all wonderful and unique. I celebrate the prizewinning Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which courageously expresses our common humanity”.
Announcing the award Margaret Busby, this year’s chair of judges, said: “Shuggie Bain is destined to be a classic — a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values.”
The 2020 shortlist included:
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)
The Booker Prize has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction since it was first awarded in 1969. It is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
Previous winners include Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo (2019), Anna Burns (2018), George Saunders (2017) and Paul Beatty (2016), among others. Arundhati Roy was the first woman of colour to win The Booker Prize (1997).
Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Scotland. He studied in London, where he graduated from the Royal College of Art. After moving to New York City he began a career in fashion design. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and on LitHub. Shuggie Bain is his first novel.
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