Interview with Margaret McDonald, Carnegie and Branford Boase winner

Early life and falling in love with writing

I was born in Glasgow and raised in East Kilbride, which is where Banjo finds himself throughout the novel. I’m from a working-class family and I’m a first-generation Uni student. I found reading and writing in high school, it wasn’t something that I massively did as a child. I was more into arts and craft, plasticine and making things with my hands. Then I discovered writing, which felt like a different kind of creation, and I just fell in love with it.

Part of that was finding fanfiction in high school, which was definitely not cool. Maybe it’s a little more accepted now, but back then it was like social death. Fanfiction is very radical in a way, because it positions the world as queer-normative. But in a Catholic high school, it wasn’t cool to be passionate about anything openly, let alone something like fanfiction.

So I wrote fanfiction in secret and didn’t tell anyone, and I just fell in love with writing as a result. I always say to kids when I do school visits that fanfiction is like writing with training wheels . You already have the setting, the characters, the world, and you can play off that and reimagine it however you want. But eventually, you outgrow it and want to create your own stories and characters.

I went on to study English Literature and Creative Writing and started taking writing more seriously. Meeting my peers, I realised it was actually quite a cool thing to be a writer. I developed the confidence to create my own characters and my own works.

How life experiences shaped Glasgow Boys

In 2017, during my second year at Uni, I had a bowel operation which led to further complications. It meant I was off Uni for six months laid up in bed and unable to walk. I didn’t write a single word during that time, but all those experiences eventually poured into Glasgow Boys, my experience of going to University, social anxiety, juggling minimum wage jobs with studies and social life, and also chronic illness and medication dependency.

I graduated in July 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. I was shielding, couldn’t go outside, didn’t have a job. So I just poured all my energy into writing Glasgow Boys. I’d been playing around with drafts, but nothing serious until then.

After restrictions lifted, I started working as a vaccine assistant, which was essentially just a glorified janitor. That became Finley’s job as a janitor. Then I worked as an Admin Assistant at a day clinic where we worked on things like addiction recovery, podiatry, wound care. I got to work alongside GPs, consultants, and nurses. And as someone who’d also been through the NHS system, it gave me a good overview from both sides. All that helped shaped Finley’s story of becoming a nurse, and dealing with the trials and tribulations of the healthcare system.

Exploring the care system in Glasgow Boys

During the pandemic, I was shielding which had a massive impact on my mental health. I went about five weeks without any human touch, which I didn’t think would be in any way life-changing, but it legitimately was. It completely changed my understanding of how vital touch is. I learned about touch starvation, a condition that disproportionately affects children in care. That broke my heart. I read that humans need about four hugs a day just for maintenance, and kids need twelve.

The subject became a bit of a special interest of mine. My fiancé works for Action for Children and we’d chat every day about the kids he worked with. These experiences, and my own experience during the pandemic, made me want to write about characters who have experienced care.

I didn’t have any personal experience of growing up in care or working with children in care, but it was really important for me that it was depicted in an authentic way. So I hired a sensitive reader, John Radoux, who is a children’s therapist who also grew up in care. His insight was absolutely essential.

Writing for Young Adults

It means the world to me that so many younger readers have connected with the book. I get asked why I write for young adults, and honestly, it’s just the experience I have the closest proximity to. I still feel like I’m in that in-between stage, done with Uni, but I graduated during the pandemic, then got my master’s in the pandemic too. We didn’t really get to mark that milestone and celebrate it properly. So I still feel like I haven’t fully crossed into adulthood.

I don’t have kids, and I’m not married, so I wouldn’t know how to write sprawling family dramas. But we’ve all been teenagers. We’ve all had first jobs, first heartbreaks. It’s a universal experience. And teenagers are so switched on. They have such interesting internal worlds that are often dismissed. I wanted to give a voice to those teenagers, especially those from working-class backgrounds, who are rarely shown in a positive light.

It was important to me that Banjo and Finley are lovable, complex characters. I wanted to demonstrate to younger readers that you’re not defined by your upbringing, you can forge your own connections and make your own choices, it just takes time. Banjo doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, maybe he’ll just work in the café. And that’s okay. The café is welcoming, they tell him he can stay as long as he likes. That kind of stability can be life-changing for someone like Banjo.

On winning the Carnegie Medal For Writing and the Branford Boase Award

I’m quite an ambitious person, so I did know about the Carnegie before I got published. It was something I thought I might win in ten years. When I got nominated, I was like, “I probably won’t even make the longlist.” At every stage, from longlist, to shortlist, to winner, I’ve been absolutely shocked. When my editor called to say that we’d won, all I could do was scream! I was absolutely over the moon.

Winning with Glasgow Boys felt extra special because it’s such a personal book. It doesn’t follow any trends, it’s not hooky or flashy. I thought it would be a niche little book. So to have it recognised like this means the world.

Winning the Branford Boase Award, which also awards editors, felt amazing. My editors at Faber, Alice Swan and Ama Badu, were incredible and deserve all the accolades for their work. We edited the book for about eight months. It didn’t even feel like work, it was so fun discussing Glasgow Boys with them because I felt like they completely understood the characters and their inner worlds. The main thing was slimming it down, but without losing what made it special. We eventually cut it down from 120,000 words to about 70,000 words for publication . But we kept the heart of the story. Originally, it was split into three parts: present, past, then back to present. Alice and Ama helped weave Banjo and Finley’s timelines together more fluidly, and they managed to capture it in a way reflects how memory really works. I just love the structure that they managed to create.