including nine children have been killed in israeli air strikes the strikes were retaliation after a barrage of rockets was fired from the territory towards jerusalem. israel says it killed at least three militants us regulators say they will allow children as young as 12 to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. children aged between 12 and 15 will be offered the pfizer—biontech jab. it had previously been limited to those aged 16 and over, under emergency use rules. a cyber—criminal gang that took a major us fuel pipeline offline over the weekend has acknowledged the incident in a public statement. darkside wrote on its website that its goal was to make money and not to create problems for society. work to restore service is continuing.

now on bbc news it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. here's a story that sounds like fiction. a boy in scotland is raised in post—industrial poverty. his father is absent, his mother addicted to alcohol and dead by the time the boy is 16. he is bullied mercilessly because he's different, gay, in an intolerant culture. that boy becomes a fashion designer. he writes a first novel which wins the prestigious booker prize. this is no fiction. his name is douglas stuart and he is my guest today. douglas stuart in new york state, welcome to hardtalk.

hi, stephen. thank you for having me. it is a great pleasure to have you on the show. douglas, i think people right around the world are still discovering your extraordinary novel, shuggie bain. they may be surprised to learn that it took you pretty much a decade, maybe a little bit more than a decade, to actually complete this novel. now, that makes it sound like it was very difficult to write. was it difficult? it was at times quite difficult to write, because it draws on a lot of experience from my own life. but like many writers, i had to juggle the writing of it with some real—world needs of being in employment and earning a living. but also a big part of why it

took me ten years to write — because ijust loved the writing of it and i didn't want to close the book, as it were, or say goodbye to the characters at the heart of it. you wrote it, interestingly, very far from where it is set because, of course, you were born and raised in glasgow, in scotland, but your home now is either in new york city or sometimes in new york state, where you are today. how did you manage to take yourself back? because the book is so evocative of that time and place — the 1980s, post—industrial glasgow, the poorest neighbourhoods in glasgow — but you haven't been living there for an awful long time. well, my family are still all on the south side of glasgow, so glasgow is still at the centre of my being and my universe and in any other year, i would be home two or three times a year, usually. so it's still my heart and it's still where i'm from and it's still how i identify myself. but you're right. i wrote the book — most of the book, actually —

living in new york. and i think that distance brings a clarity, but it also brings an enormous amount of longing for me. and it was that longing or that homesickness that i felt that kept me coming back to this project and to this page every — every time. and for me, i felt as though the world and the people who knew me didn't quite understand me because the boy that i was growing up in glasgow, being raised on government benefits, and then the man that i became working for these big fashion houses in new york, people couldn't quite understand the entirety of me. and so in a way, the distance and the writing about my childhood in glasgow was a way to explain me as a complete person. i'm interested you couch it that way, talking about other people coming to understand you. do you think you were also coming to understand yourself i think so. i think when you are a child

who grows up with the trauma of loving a parent who has addiction, you don't always have control in that situation. and sitting down to write — not a memoir, because shuggie is not a memoir, itjust is drawn from a lot of personal experience — but you take control when you write fiction and you're able to examine things and to turn them over and think about them. and that, for me, was incredibly powerful. it's full of pain — i mean, it's love and pain, this book. it is a love story. the centre of it, really, is, i suppose, the relationship between young shuggie and his mum agnes, and agnes is in a spiral of addiction and she eventually dies as a result of her alcoholism. it's a love story and it's deeply, deeply painful. and as you've already alluded to, your own life was full of love and pain as a kid, too. so was it very raw exploring a fiction which, you know,

has so much resonance with your own life? it could be raw at times, but it also brought me — and this might sound strange to say — an awful lot ofjoy. it is not only a sad book, it is a funny book, it's a tender book, it's oftentimes it's violent. and for me, it's a book about humanity and about the broadest experience of people living in glasgow in those housing schemes at that time. and so, i wanted to just pack it full of life and really celebrate the glaswegian spirit in many ways, because i think we went through a collective hard time. it's not just about this one single family at the heart of the book who went through this high unemployment and this social upheaval, it's about many people around them, and for me, i wanted to just pack that full of that chorus of really urgent voices and just all the humanity i could. yeah. i do want to talk about that and the sort of context and the politics of the time but just sticking to the personalfor a bit, i mean, i haven't lived with an immediate family member who's suffered from alcoholism and that deep level of addiction that, in the end, endangers life. ijust wonder, as you think about your own life — leave aside agnes and shuggie, the fictional characters —

but you and your own mother, the love, was it mixed with a degree of anger and do you have complicated feelings about the way you were brought up? actually, it's not mixed with any anger at all. i think the thing about children is they are really remarkable — they deal with whatever is in front of them because they have no context. they have no idea that things could be different or there could be other lives being lived. and what i wanted to show with the character of shuggie is that he just deals with whatever comes up and every single day, he has a glimmer of hope where he picks himself up and he dusts himself off. even when things are happening to his mother or in his own personaljourney towards his discovering his sexuality and his own being, he keeps getting up and continuing on again, and that really is the spirit of a lot of children. they, you know, they are — they're incredibly tenacious, they're really remarkable, they can cope with an awful lot. in a funny way, i wasn't aware that this was so, so different to what other kids were going through when i was that age because there

were also other children and other parents on the housing scheme i grew up in who were going through similar things — maybe not the exact same thing, but they were going through similar things — and it sounds a bit strange but there's a solidarity in that and there's an understanding that people are going through it and it was only as an adult, as a writer, when i managed to cast my eye back over my childhood and when you start to meet people in your life and you realise perhaps they're born into privilege or — privilege is a big word, but they're just born into a very stable upbringing and home life that you realise, "wow, that was — that was unusual". you talk in the book of shuggie�*s merciless sort of suffering from bullying, and that's partly because he's so obviously a child who is different and, you know, he, ithink, has a feeling from fairly early on in his sort of later childhood that he's gay but he can't express that because you simply could not

in the glasgow neighbourhoods that he was growing up in — and of course, i'm again bound to draw some parallels in your own life. and ijust wonder whether you were as isolated and whether you suffered as much from the ruthless sort of bullying, the brutality of other kids, as shuggie did. i certainly did, and this has actually nothing to do with glasgow — this was a universal truth for the 1980s, where i think gay people felt incredibly lonely and homophobia was just part of society. it could be very casual banter or it could be a totally different frequency, or it was very pointed violence. and what i wanted to show for shuggie is he's living in a place where masculinity is only allowed to express itself in very narrow ways. even the heterosexual men around him have to behave a certain way and not really talk about their finer feelings or their sadness or their fears or their hopes. and here is this little boy who is in thrall to his mother. his entire universe is this

very glamorous woman. and so, it infects him almost with a little bit of precociousness and a little snobbery of his own, perhaps, and his effeminacy is seen as a very threatening thing — it'sjust, there's just no place for it. why would you want to be like that? and they keep asking him. it's not a sexual thing, because he's far too young. it'sjust, "why are you like that? "you know, you're no�* right," they keep saying, and that was how it was. and that was sanctioned all throughout society, i think, or all throughout my childhood. and it wasn't done by bad people — it was just how we understood queerness at the time. and shuggie, and even his supporters in the book, have no language to give him. they can't say to him, "you're gay and it's ok and things will get better" because people in 1981 didn't have that way to express it, and certainly not growing up in a real working class community, there was no way to say that, and so shuggie�*s incredibly isolated. interesting that you say of the people who were sort of bullying and ostracising shuggie, that they were not bad

people. they were doing bad things but it was such a cultural sort of trope that there was no way they weren't going to do those things. i mean, there's so much understanding and humanity in the way you write about the people who are the bullies and who do the bad things. do you — ijust wonder whether you still feel that applies today? i mean, we've moved on, you know, 30, a0 years from the setting of shuggie bain. there are still plenty of homophobes in many different communities around the world. are you still able to look at that cultural phenomenon with the same degree of understanding and humanity? well, i hope i always look at things with understanding and humanity but anyone who is committing homophobic acts today should be condemned, because we know better. and i think a lot of what i tried to say with shuggie is that in the 1980s, people didn't know better and i can forgive them for that. two of shuggie�*s biggest

champions in the book, his grandmother and his older brother, who adore him, adore the boots of him, you know, they absolutely love this little boy and yet still, they long for him to be normal. they keep saying to him, you know, "you have to nip that in the bud" or his brother teaches him how to walk as he believes a real boy should walk, or a heterosexual man, and that comes from a place of love. so i can understand that context in the �*80s but anybody today who still operates from a place of hate should be condemned for it. how long, douglas, did it take you to — i don't know if trauma is the right word — but recover from the psychological damage done by everything you experienced in childhood? because you've talked about — i'm going to quote something you said a little while ago. you said that you "had three constant, nagging sort of anxieties, concerns when you were growing up. "any time", you say, "i went into a room, i felt bad about one of these three — whether i was gay, whether my mother was suffering at home or whether i was poor". these were the sort

of insecurities that you lived with. and ijust wonder how long it took you to rid yourself of the insecurities and at times, even, it seems, the self—loathing that you had as a youngster? well, god bless you for thinking that i've done that already! both chuckle. i think that's — i think that's a journey that i'm constantly on. you know, i — one of the things that's really come over me in the past decade, i think, is sort of a casting off of fear and other people'sjudgement. when i wrote shuggie bain, i wanted to write it for the characters at the heart of it and to really be in support of them and to stand with them, and that meant sometimes that i had to be really unflinching and it also meant that i had to write things that i knew readers might not want to read about. and i wanted to commit to that. i wanted to have that bravery on the page and be that transparent. and that is part of the journey of rejecting shame. the book is so much about pride and shame and self—worth,

and that's a journey i'm still on today. how far down the journey, how far down the track are you? well, there's different frequencies there. i think in terms of embracing my whole self, my whole queer identity that i'm very proud of, i'm quite far down the track. that started to come in my 20s and 30s, when i could find some love for myself inside myself — after being told my entire childhood to sort of despise myself or hate myself. the poverty thing is still something that i struggle with every single day because we still send out really strong class signals and in fact, even the book publishing in america versus it publishing in the uk has been two entirely different experiences for me. in america, it's been accepted as a piece of art that either fails or succeeds on its own merit. yet, when i speak about it in the uk, it intersects very quickly with class and sometimes, i can't almost talk about the book without addressing those things.

and then i — my feelings about my mother and my mother's addiction are coloured so much with such a sense of loss and grief and waste that that is something i think i'll never be over. i harbour no anger there because i think actually, if i was a woman and a mother in �*70s and �*80s glasgow and the things that happened to me — the things that happened to agnes in the book happened to me, i don't know if i would be able to cope either. and so, i can have no anger there but i'm still sort of recovering from that grief, i think. forgive me, i'm going to ask you a very intrusive question, but again, it intrigues me because many people watching this will have experience of addiction in their own lives orfamilies. were you ever tempted to seek escape, diversion, whatever, dissolve your problems and self—loathing, difficult feelings in alcohol or drugs at any point in your life? because you'd seen it, you'd seen the damage it did to your own mother. did you ever come close?

well, i think that's also a journey and something that i can't look back on in hindsight because i'm still on the planet. the first part of the answer is no. i never, ever did, because i'd seen the destruction it wreaked and the loss, how everything compounded and kept getting worse for people who turned to those things. and the loneliness too, i was already lonely as a young man and the thing about addiction is, it increases loneliness for people because a lot of people who love them or want to help them start to pull away. but i always say i'm still on the planet, stephen. i don't — nobody knows what is coming for them. and we've all been through a really testing year. and so i hope and i pray that it will never be me. but i also think the character of agnes bain, you know, 32, would sit there and think, "oh, that would never be me and that will never happen." and so we just don't know. mm. you say that you feel enormous love for glasgow. of course, you sit in new york, but you clearly have glasgow

still imprinted deep in your mind and in your soul. and i'm struggling in a way to understand why you love glasgow, because glasgow was a tough old place for you to grow up in and, in a way, i would have thought escape would have been something wonderful for you and you might have been tempted to think, "i never want to think much about that city ever again." well, i think the question might be is glasgow didn't love me for a very long time and didn't know quite what to do with me as a young man, but i've always loved glasgow and i still love glasgow. and i think of shuggie, in a way, as my homecoming, me reintroducing myself to the city and claiming my place in glasgow. but it's also, in a way, a love letter, because in the ten years of writing shuggie, i didn't ever know if it would be published. i didn't necessarily need it to be published. and so writing the book was about a relationship i was having with the city and with the characters. and that was enough for me in many ways.

and so... glaswegians are remarkable people, but they also will never stand for false flattery or for someone talking about love as big hearts and big flowers. they want honesty and they want people to tell their truth truthfully. and so even though it's a love story to glasgow, it's a complicated love story and it's not always perfect. let me now take you back to something you said earlier in the interview about the context of the 1980s and the fact that glasgow was perhaps the most obvious sort of victim of post—industrial policy in the united kingdom, a decision — and you pin it very fairly and squarely on margaret thatcher and her government — to close down many of the sort of heavy industries that have defined glasgow's economy, that is steel and coal and those associated heavy industries. you seem angry about that and you seem quite politicised about that.

and yet, in many ways, surely people today would look back and say, �*you know what, that had to happen.�* and scotland was in the beginnings of a process of evolution where it is now a very different economy and that, you know, economies have to change and people have to accept that their old lives can no longer be lived. well, i reject the idea that i'm angry about it. i think all i tried to do is put it on the page and let other people draw their conclusions from it. but i didn't write with a 2020 lens that's looking at the ultimate outcome and the renaissance of scotland and its industries. what i'm writing about is how it feels for those people living in the 1980s and how, when we force men to struggle, women and children sufferfirst. alright. and that was the truth of the time and that's, you know, everything i do in the book, i don't look at it with the moralistic lenses of where we are today. i look at it how it really was on the ground level in 1981, 1976.

and that's the importance of the characters. but that's also my role as an author, to stand with the characters, to support them and their truth and not to turn around and be beholden to whatever the expectations are of today. you mentioned class, and you said it's a different debate in america from that in the united kingdom. do you think today, it is still very difficult for somebody who has come from a poor, disadvantaged background such as your own to have their voice heard in the arts? yeah... well, the arts is an interesting way to end that sentence. i think the arts is one of the places where we can really rise up and let our voices be heard. but i think it's as difficult today. i thought i'd written shuggie as a historical novel and that we were looking back at this specific time and place. but i think there's been many signals this year between how

we have looked at exam results, how we have treated children who need school dinners, that say that it's still incredibly difficult for children living in poverty and as hard today for them to make something of themselves because of how society is organised around them. so i'm just wondering, you know, because there is such an emphasis in the arts in particular on getting a diverse range of voices, giving new accessibility, whether it be to, you know, people of different sexual orientations, different races, racial backgrounds. but of all the barriers and glass ceilings to break down, do you think class is perhaps more insidious and less talked about than the others? well, i don't ever like to compare it with the struggles that other people are having for representation, or say one is worse or one is better, because i think we're having so many really important conversations about race and identity that need to be had at this moment,

and ongoing. but class is always incredibly difficult in the united kingdom. and, you know, i didn't actually have a sense that the book i had written came from the outside until people started to tell me that working class voices come from the margins because it's my entire life, it's who i am. and they've always been at the centre of my life and i feel that. but we definitely see that working class voices are still marginalised in the united kingdom. and certainly growing up in scotland in the �*80s, i never heard of people. i never read books. i never saw anything, really, on the television about people who were living the similar sort of life to myself. and it was only as an adult that i could go out and i could search out scottish literature. i could search out queer voices, working class voices and had to educate myself on those. you've made an extraordinarily successful life in the united states for many years. you were a fashion designer. i believe you've given that up now to be a full—time writer,

but you are married to your long—term partner. you clearly have now a very successful writing career. you're a us citizen. and yet, as i understand it, your next projects are all taking you back to scotland. why is that? why are you not embracing a sort of writer's horizon which looks across the united states right now? well, i think give me time, first of all. hopefully, i have a long career and a chance to do that. but i identify myself first and foremost as scottish. i think of myself as glaswegian. anybody that meets me in the world doesn't think of me as american, they think of me as glaswegian. and i'm proud of that. and so i think that when you grew up in a city that had so much inspiration and conflict and humanity and hope and loss, then it's really an amazing sort of font of inspiration. and i'm still working through so many issues and themes and characters from my childhood, and even

from my life today with my family still in scotland that i want to really focus there for the next couple of books. does that mean that we might hear more from shuggie bain at some point? because i know your next project isn't about shuggie at all, but we've left shuggie as a teenager in glasgow. there's a lot more of shuggie to learn about, isn't there? and are we going to? there is a lot for shuggie, a lot more to come for shuggie, i think. i don't know that — i won't commit to that today. i'm not quite sure if i will write about him some more. the reason why i left shuggie where he is in the book is because, really, the book is about the end of agnes and the beginning of shuggie. but i wanted readers to feel a little bit of a responsibility to the future of this young boy and to think about intergenerational poverty and all the headwinds that were sort of blowing against shuggie in that moment, and just to sit back and wonder, "wow, will he make

it and what will he make of himself?" because everything's — there for shuggie, but it could go many different ways and i think that was what i really wanted readers to focus on. douglas stuart, it's been fascinating talking to you. thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you. hello. as yesterday, today is shaping up to be a day of sunny spells and showers. the devil is going to be in the detail, though for the next fews days. those showers circling this large area of low pressure with still fairly tightly packed isobars today. but as the week goes on, the low pressure remains with us just slowly meandering southwards but the winds become lighter, so the showers will become slow—moving.

lengthier spells of rain even as we pick up another area of low pressure within our main one. that means most of us will have some wetter weather as we go through this week in the form of showers. you can see those rainfall totals are going to be totting up. for the day ahead, as i say, it's a day of sunny spells and showers. best of the sunshine will be this morning but as yesterday those showers will be pretty intense as we go into the afternoon with thunderstorms around. and we've got more persistent rain across the northwest of scotland, still further showers to come. not easing away everywhere it will be a cool night but largely frost free. a few showers will come into southern and western parts of england, possibly wales as well towards dawn. any bits of mist and low cloud first thing will meander out of the way. plenty of sunshine to come as you can see through the morning hours but won't be long before that strong may sunshine continues to work bubbling up the cloud, showers develop more widely. fairly brisk wind in southern and western areas. 0ur rain slow to clear but gradually over the northwest

of scotland in a real rash of showers following behind with hail, thunder, squally winds. between 16 and 17 feeling quite pleasant but clearly in those downpours there could be quite a lot of localised standing water. and they continue through the evening and overnight. temperatures falling back in single figures but largely frost free. and then we're reallyhasing those showers. the devil really will be in the detail this week with showers. might be that we have that more persistent rain hanging around in the northwest of scotland, possibly more meandering into western areas. possibly even with low pressure pushing into the far south of england. what we do know is there will be heavy downpours around becoming more slow—moving by wednesday. still 15s and 16s between the showers but lengthy spells of rain and thunder. a pretty showery picture for the rest of the week. there is more on the website.

this is bbc news, i'm david eades with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. 20 people have been killed in israeli air strikes on gaza say local health authorities, after rockets were fired from the territory towards jerusalem. this follows clashes at one of the most sensitive sites injerusalem, israeli security forces fired stun grenades and rubber bullets during clashes with palestinians in which hundreds were injured. us regulators have authorized the pfizer vaccine for use in children as young as 12 years old. are the movie awards losing their lustre? the us tv network nbc says it won't broadcast the golden globe awards next year, because of worries over ethics and diversity.