An Evening with Douglas Stuart (Part One)

Douglas Stewart, Booker Prize-winning author of *Shuggie Bain* and *Young Mungo*, returns to the spotlight with his new novel *John of John*, a haunting exploration of identity, belonging, and the unspoken burdens of family and faith on Scotland’s remote Isle of Harris. In this intimate live conversation at Union Chapel, Stewart reveals how the novel emerged from a deeply personal journey—writing on the islands for 12 weeks, surviving a night with a dead ram, and confronting his own absence of generational roots. The story follows Cal, a 22-year-old gay man returning home after art school, only to find himself trapped in a rigid Presbyterian community where love, sexuality, and selfhood are suppressed. What begins as a tale of homecoming unravels into a meditation on how the past shapes the present, and how silence can be a form of love—and of violence. Stewart dissects the novel’s central question—'Who do you belong to?'—as both a literal lineage and a psychological prison, drawing from his own life as a gay man without grandparents, raised in poverty, and shaped by a world that never let him feel at home. The novel’s rich textures—Harris Tweed, Gaelic naming, and the physicality of weaving—become metaphors for identity, tradition, and the tension between individuality and duty. At its heart, *John of John* is not about Cal’s return, but about the people he left behind, and the quiet, enduring love that persists in the margins of silence.