COMEDIAN Janey Godley, singer Karine Polwart and partners in crime writing Chris Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman are among those joining 2020 Booker winner Douglas Stuart at Paisley Book Festival next month. This year’s event will be a digital forum but it means audiences will be able to listen in the comfort of their own homes to contributors from across the world. The theme, Radical New Futures, emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic and the resilience and fortitude that people and communities have shown. It has also been inspired by the importance that green spaces have played as solace and recuperation over the last year.
Nicola Sturgeon says books including Scabby Queen and Lockdown got her through 2020
The First Minister s list included Scottish titles such as Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes and Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning debut Shuggie Bain.
Nicola Sturgeon is an avid fan of reading. (Image: Colin Hattersley/PA)
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Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart will feature alongside others such as Andrew O’Hagan, Graeme Armstrong and Kirstin Innes ORGANISERS of a Scottish book festival have scored a literary coup by securing the Booker prize winner for a guest appearance. Douglas Stuart will be joining acclaimed Scottish writers Andrew O’Hagan and Graeme Armstrong at Paisley Book Festival in February. As well as winning the 2020 Booker Prize, Stuart’s gritty autobiographical novel has also been named Scottish Waterstones’ Book of the Year. Along with O’Hagan’s most recent book, Mayflies, and Armstrong’s The Young Team, Stuart’s debut novel, Shuggie Bain, shines a light on the complexities of class and masculine identity.
Charting the story of Clio Campbell, Scabby Queen stretches over five decades, taking in the miners’ strikes to Brexit and beyond. It is a portrait of a woman told by her friends, lovers, enemies and fans.
“It’s not a spoiler: after the introduction the lead character is found dead and I started off with the idea that who would do that and leave their body for a person to find?” explains Kirstin, who lives in a small Renfrewshire village with her partner – the author and playwright Alan Bissett – and their two sons.
“I started working around this idea of a person who was very charismatic and magnetic and formed intense, short-lived relationships. It seemed to make sense to tell her story from the points of view of all of the people whose lives she’d been in along the way.