Ever since Douglas Stuart burst upon the literary scene, I have been a huge fan. He writes exceptionally well. So, I was delighted when an opportunity to interview him for the TOI Bookmark* podcast presented itself. Overjoyed is more like it. John of Johns is an outstanding novel. So, to be able to interview the author immediately after having finished it, is a dream come true. We recorded this episode on 19 May 2026. It is published by Pan Macmillan India.

On 7 Nov 2026, Douglas Stuart made history with Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year win by having won it twice. His latest novel, John of John, has claimed the honour six years after his debut, Shuggie Bain, won the same prize in 2020. Now to discover on Monday 9 nov 2026 if he has achieved the same success with The Booker Prize 2026.

I am not even going to try and explain what the novel is about or analyse it. Read it for yourself. Here is a snippet from our conversation:

“I never believe the idea that people of faith are not human first. We are all human and we are all struggling. Whether it is on a moral scale or just on an idea what is life about and why are we here? So, as to paint the nuance of that is part of the idea why I wanted to write the book to really humanise. The modern world looks at the people of faith as if they are a trope or a cliché or just one type of thing. I think novels are a wonderful way to portray, better than painting a portrait, better than cinema, not only do you have the surface and the aesthetic, but you also have the interiority, the moral layer, the historical layer, the desire, the sexual, you have all of it. You can move in temporal directions that you cannot in other forms of capturing human life.”

Listen to it on Spotify:

It is available on Spotify:

From the book blurb:

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.

This is a novel worth reading!

8 Nov 2026

*TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 214+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA, Turing Prize, Magsaysay Prize etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ & Lin King, David Szalay, Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Damodar Mauzo, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, Sanjoy Roy, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Andrew Miller, Catherine Chidgey, Dr Rachel Clarke, Charlotte Wood, Megha Majumdar, Kiran Desai, Ken Follett, Philippe Sands, Victoria Bateman, Anuradha Roy, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Danny Rensch, Anne Beate Hovind, Tayari Jones, Lyse Doucet, M. John Harrison, Luke Kennard, and Annie Ernaux.

It is available on Spotify.