Booker Prize 2026: Douglas Stuart longlisted for prestigious literary award he won in 2020

He is a Scottish fashion designer who shot to fame with the publication of his first book during the pandemic - which told the powerful story of a gay young man growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s.

Now Scottish author and fashion designer Douglas Stuart has been longlisted for the Booker prize for his novel John of John, six years after scooping the prize for Shuggie Bain.

The longlisted work follows Cal, a young queer man reluctantly returning home from college on the Scottish mainland in the late 1990s to his family croft on Harris to care for his grandmother.

The “Booker Dozen” of 13 longlisted books, which also includes Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say and Marlon James’ The Disappearers, has been selected by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by classicist Mary Beard and which also includes musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker.

Judges praised John of John for its “beautiful, imagistic detail”.

Douglas Stuart describes his three novels, Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo and John of John as a 'loose triptych'. | Martyn Pickersgill

They said: “This excavation of family, violence and shame is woven through with beautiful imagistic detail, and – unexpectedly – shades of hope. We loved the rich, textural detail of the story.”

Nominated alongside Stuart is another past winner, Marlon James, as well as Elizabeth Strout, who has been previously shortlisted and longlisted twice.

Authors representing seven nationalities and three continents have been longlisted, with the majority of authors from the UK.

Ms Beard said: “Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock. But there’s one thing they all share. Every writer on our longlist brilliantly musters the power of words on the page to take the reader to new places, to see old places from new angles, to change minds.

“Books are not mirrors: they don’t simply reflect ourselves back to us. One of the many important things about fiction is that it helps us see what it might be like not to be us, to begin to understand the perspectives of others, and to imagine what it might be like to see the world differently. Great books are not cosy. In their various ways, the novels we have chosen are (we hope) dynamite.”

If Stuart were to win the overall prize, he, along with fellow longlisted author James, would become only the fifth author to have been awarded the Booker Prize twice, joining JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood.

Earlier this year. Scotsman literary editor David Robinson praised John of John, saying, “If it were up to me, I’d give Douglas Stuart another Booker prize right away”.

The longlisted books are of varying lengths. Six of the books on the list are less than 250 pages long, with three under 200. Meanwhile, the longest – Marlon James’s fifth novel, The Disappearers – is over 600 pages long.

For the second time, the Booker Prize shortlist will be announced at a public event at London’s Southbank Centre in September. The winner, who receives £50,000 and a trophy, will be revealed in November.