Douglas Stuart — John of John
Booker Prize-winning Douglas Stuart presents his new novel following a young man's return to his Hebridean island home, with Aminatta Forna at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
Douglas Stuart won the Booker for Shuggie Bain—a novel about poverty, addiction, and love in Glasgow so precise it felt like testimony. His new book takes him somewhere stranger and quieter: the outer Hebrides.
Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and established him as one of the most important novelists writing today—a writer capable of rendering working-class Scottish life with a specificity and emotional force that made the book feel essential. John of John is his follow-up, a quieter and stranger work that follows a young man returning to the remote Hebridean island where he grew up.
Stuart joins Politics and Prose in conversation with Aminatta Forna, the Sierra Leonean-Scottish novelist whose own work navigates between cultures and histories with unusual grace. The two writers in conversation promises to be one of the more interesting literary evenings of the spring—both working in territory where landscape and identity are entangled.
The event is free and livestreamed. Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC.