Booker-shortlisted novelists describe the ideas behind their books

A conversation at a kitchen table in the Isle of Harris changed the direction of Douglas Stuart’s novel John of John, shifting its focus from a son returning home to the father he had left behind. Stuart is among six writers shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize who have described the experiences and ideas that set their novels in motion.

Stuart said he travelled through the Western Isles in 2019, initially considering a story about an adult son returning to a crofting community to care for his difficult father. While visiting Harris, he spoke with a local woman about people in the community who had never married. Her suggestion that some had “missed their moment” prompted him to consider how difficult it might have been for gay people to find love in a small settlement.

That exchange led Stuart to imagine a weaver tied to the land, unable to find love or a sense of himself in the place where he belonged. He said the islands’ beauty sat alongside practical challenges, including making a living and raising a family, and that he had wanted to write about creativity, nature, music and working-class life.

Elizabeth Strout said The Things We Never Say grew partly from a brief encounter in a drugstore in her Maine town. A woman working there spoke to her privately about wanting the US election to be over. Strout said the woman’s distress, and her own, helped inspire a book about people troubled by the state of the United States but often reluctant to discuss it with one another.

The novel centres on Artie Dam, a high-school history teacher. Strout said an old photograph found in an obituary helped her picture the character, while the country’s political situation shaped the book’s wider story. She described it as following a man whose personal life unfolds alongside events in the country.

Marlon James said The Disappearers draws on a story he had heard about an alleged attack on gay men in Kingston in the early 1990s. He recalled rumours of a mob assault at a gathering connected either to a support group or Jamaica AIDS Support, but stressed that the claims were allegations. James said the story had haunted him and that, as a novelist, he is drawn to accounts with gaps and uncertainty, imagining the lives and consequences around events that are difficult to establish.

Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King began as two separate short stories: one about an attendant to a dying king, the other about a lonely woman arranging replica food in her home. Perry said she realised the characters belonged in one book. A visit to the Royal Magdalene Almshouses in Glastonbury had also prompted her interest in staging and replicas. She described extensive rewriting and said events in Gaza influenced the medieval sections of the novel, particularly its treatment of power.

Luke Kennard said Black Bag began in March 2021, when he came across a footnote about a 1967 University of Oregon psychology experiment while browsing research for poetic phrases. The idea of someone performing as a black bag sparked a scene about an out-of-work actor and a psychology lecturer; Kennard said he abandoned the poem he had been working on and began writing the novel.

M John Harrison said The End of Everything takes the conventions of catastrophe and alien-invasion fiction in a different direction. Rather than presenting a bounded disaster that is resolved, he wanted a continuing crisis that characters struggle to understand. Harrison linked the novel’s concerns to political confusion, environmental damage and the difficulty of making factual claims amid the internet and Trumpism.

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