An Evening with Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart’s third novel, JOHN OF JOHN , is a work of quiet devastation and profound beauty. It tells the story of John-Calum Macleod, known as Cal, who returns penniless to the Isle of Harris  in the Outer  Hebrides after his dreams of art school success crumble in the city. Back at the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal finds himself caught between his father John, a sheep farmer and tweed weaver who’s a prominent leader in their local church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a scurrilous Glaswegian whose relationship with her son-in-law has been fraught for ages.

Stuart writes with a lightness of prose that belies the emotional and philosophical weight of his story. JOHN OF JOHN is about fathers and sons, about belonging and exile, about the tension between who we are and who we're expected to be—and about deep secrets that inevitably rise to the surface. The pastoral setting is a departure from Stuart's previous Glasgow novels, but his eye for the small, telling detail and his capacity to render complex family dynamics with compassion remain as sharp as ever. Stuart is a writer who understands that the most intimate family stories can illuminate the largest questions about identity, faith, and the possibility of redemption.

Stuart’s work has sold over one million copies worldwide and been translated into over forty languages, and his short stories have appeared in the New Yorker. In addition to the Booker Prize, Shuggie Bain has won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and he was a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, PEN/Hemingway Award, and Kirkus Prize, among others. Young Mungo was a Sunday Times #1 bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. Stuart lives in New York City.

Elaine Feeney is an award-winning Irish writer from the west of Ireland. She works across poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. Her debut novel As You Were won multiple prizes and was met with widespread acclaim. Her second novel How to Build a Boat was Booker Prize–nominated and widely listed among best books of 2023 including Best Fiction in The New Yorker. Feeney won Irish Author of the Year 2025 at the Irish Book Awards for her third novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way. She has published several poetry collections and works on the Tuam Oral History Project in University of Galway, archiving the narrative of the institution. She has been published widely including, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly and Oxford Poetry. She is currently working on a stage adaptation of her novel As You Were and a fourth novel. She lectures in the University of Galway.