‘The Two Roberts’ is my new novel and it’s out with Canongate in September 2025. It’s my love-letter to two almost-forgotten Scottish pioneers, exploring what it means to discover your voice as an artist, to find love when it’s forbidden and to change the way the world sees. Prepare to fall in love with Bobby and Robert… You can pre-order it here!
I am also curating a show at Charleston all about the Two Roberts, their world and their work - also on September 2025.
Thank you to all the good teachers, brave editors and generous readers for your support then and now. And if you’re reading this, and thinking of doing your own writing, I’ll let you into a secret: you’re already a writer, you just need to put your own story first.
Here is a list of all my books and stories so far. Thanks for taking the time to check them out. If you’d like a signed copy, please get in touch via my Contact page and I’ll send you a signed bookplate.
Praise for Damian Barr
“Maggie & Me is a work of stealthy genius”
“Full to the brim with poignancy, humour, brutality and energetic and sometimes shimmering prose”
“Sweeping yet intimate, heart-breaking yet often very funny…This book confirms Barr as one of our most brilliant and big-hearted writers ”
MORE ABOUT BOOKS.
This is one of my first memories of the power of words:
My Mum had an old Golden Virginia Tobacco tin filled with words written in block capitals on tiny squares of paper. We called it The Word Tin. I’d pick a word out and she’d teach me how to say it and tell me what it meant before showing me how to write it down. All the words smelled of sweet tobacco. I could read and write by the time I went to school. Not so many years later my mother suffered a brain hemorrhage and nearly died. She had to learn to walk and talk again and read and write and I got out that old tin and showed her the words she showed me. They smelled just as sweet.
Books are at the heart of my life and I am lucky enough to make my living telling stories - some true, some truer still. I tell stories to help people better understand themselves and others, to ask better questions not provide easy answers.
Maggie & Me is my memoir of growing up and coming out in Thatcher's Britain (Scotland to be exact, Motherwell broadly, Newarthill precisely). A Radio 4 Book of the Week, the Sunday Times named it Memoir of the Year and it won various lovely awards. I’m hard at work coadapting it for the stage right now—it’s going to be a play for the National Theatre of Scotland!
Bloomsbury pre-empted my debut novel You Will Be Safe Here on one chapter. As titles go, it's fairly misleading. Inspired by real events, it’s a novel of connected parts which uncovers a hidden colonial history and present-day darkness while exploring our capacity for cruelty and kindness. You Will Be Safe Here was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and Book of the Year in thr Guardian, Observer and Times.
In 2023, I moved to Canongate Books on a two-book deal and that feels like a very special sort of homecoming. I’m working on another novel and a follow-up to Maggie & Me. Watch this space!