A fashion designer turned bestselling author, Douglas Stuart was born in 1976 and raised in Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow. In 2020, he won the Booker prize for his 1980s set debut novel Shuggie Bain, a beautiful yet devastating portrait of the love between a mother battling alcohol addiction and her youngest son Shuggie, which was inspired by his own childhood experiences growing up in poverty. In 2022, he released Young Mungo, a love story between two young men, and now his exceptional new novel John of John is published on 21 May (Picador) and he tours the UK from tomorrow until 29 May. An exploration of family love, masculinity and loneliness, it begins when art school graduate John-Calum Macleod reluctantly returns from the Scottish mainland to the family croft on the Isle of Harris. Stuart lives in New York with his husband.

Watch the film of Douglas’s picks below - or scroll down to read. Enjoy!

I think the Outer Hebrides is my favourite place on Earth. I grew up in Glasgow, and we never had money to explore the rest of the country. But in 2019, I was beginning to write my new novel and I wanted to write about loneliness and what it was like to grow up gay in a rural place. So I took 12 weeks out of life, and I went to the Outer Hebrides, and when I made it to Harris, man, I fell in love. The lunar-like east coast with all the rocks, mountains and hills is just stunning. And then there’s the Harris Tweed weaving. The weavers there make the cloth in the same way they did for hundreds of years, in sheds behind their homes, and the colours of the cloth come from the natural world around them. It's incredibly beautiful and I'm trying to buy as much of it as I can. I just bought a brand new overcoat and I have this weird fantasy where I'm going to leave it for one of my five nephews when I leave the planet.

The Irish singer-songwriter CMAT has some amazing bangers and an incredible showmanship that's full of working-class joy and buoyancy. But what I love about her is that she's a world-class writer. I like to put on her music and turn the lights off to listen to how great the lyrics are. She has talents that poets and novelists would envy – an ability to set a scene, to build a character and then twist expectations really quickly. For me, she's got skills on the level of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. It's so exciting to see someone so young step into their talent. I think she'll really become a generational talent. She’s that good. Her song Lord, Let That Tesla Crash is one of the greatest things I've heard recently. It’s poetry.

As an author, you're often asked what was your favourite childhood book. Sometimes you're asked what was read to you at bedtime and I think we have to acknowledge that not every child has books or is read to at bedtime. Certainly I grew up in a house that didn't have books, and that was similar to a lot of the houses around me. What I did have was a brother who was 13 years older than me and my first reading experience was diving through his music collection – listening and reading along taught me to read. One of the things we've definitely lost [as a society] is that huge gatefold LP experience where as a kid you were confronted with lyrics and writing for the first time but also artwork. 

I hate to say that the first poet I ever read was Meat Loaf, but it might be true. I remember Queen's Night at the Opera, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and I think about Pink Floyd's The Wall and the anger that was contained in that. I remember reading lyrics and understanding about romance and sexual desire, about metaphor and hidden meanings. It was actually a really powerful way to start reading. Big brothers are probably the greatest thing on the planet and I was really grateful that mine was as cool as he was.

I am obsessed with Trackie's work. He's a queer working-class artist from Whiteinch in Glasgow. He loves to skewer lad culture and often takes things that are iconic within working-class communities, whether it's the banger car or the tracksuit, and then he flips it and puts luxury insignias all over it and brings those two things together. But what's important for me is how he uses humour. Art can be very serious and a little self-serious, and that can push people back. What Trackie does invites everybody in. Something else that he does that's very vital is he represents queerness in working-class art. One of my favourite series of his is when he takes a bunch of football jerseys and puts witty things like “big girl’s blouse” where the player's name should be. For any young queer person who is traumatised by that experience of being on a Scottish football pitch as an eight-year-old in the lashing rain, and feeling not very good at it and confused about our own feelings – I love that someone confronts that head-on.

I love Italian cinema because it portrays the working class in a way that is fully realised – there's loads of joy and happiness but also no flinching when it comes to the hardship of life. Sophia Loren has got such an impressive filmography and a lot of her career has been focused on the portrayal of working-class women – which, as the son of a single mother, I love to see – and there are some films of hers that people should watch. Firstly, A Special Day (1977), set in pre-war Rome, when the entire city turns out to celebrate Hitler’s visit. One mother in a tower block stays home and spends the day with her neighbour, who she doesn't know but she catches in the act of committing suicide. It’s a beautiful film about how gay men and women find comfort and solace with one another but it's also a terrifying look at the banality of fascism, which feels very pertinent now. Then there’s Two Women from 1960, the performance that Sophia won her Oscar for, and The Life Ahead from 2020, when she was 86, and she plays Lola, a former prostitute and Holocaust survivor who takes in a young orphaned Senegalese immigrant called Momo, who’s 12. 

But I think my favourite is Marriage Italian Style from 1964. Sophia plays Filumena, who becomes mistress to an affluent businessman played by Marcello Mastroianni. It's very clever on how women can give their best years to a man and be left with nothing in the end. There’s one scene where she’s so furious at him but also absolutely starving because she's been pretending to be dead [to try to get him to marry her] and she's shovelling pasta into her mouth while screaming at him. For me that [portrayal] of working-class abandon is just perfect. 

Interview by Imogen Carter