Interview with Douglas Bruton

Douglas Bruton is a Scottish author or art centric literary fiction. He’s published three novels with Fairlight Books: Blue Postcards (2021) With or Without Angels (2023) and most recently Woman in Blue (2025). Check out our interview with Douglas Bruton on his latest novel below to learn a little more about what inspires him!

Woman In Blue is your fifth published book, have you noticed any interesting differences in the publication process between your novels?

The publication of each of my books has been a different experience. Editors change and each editor has a different way of working. I would say this is the fun part of the process, getting to know a new editor and learning to work with them on the project. I also know a little more about how things work and know that getting a book published is only the start; you then have to get the book into the hands of readers and I am a little better at doing that now.

What do you hope people take away from Woman in Blue?

Above everything, I hope that the reader of my wee book goes to see the painting. As for anything else they might take from the book I have learned not to be too prescriptive about that sort of thing. I hope they like the book of course, but I am not writing to put any deep and profound message out there. Maybe the book is a little about looking – looking at art. And about love too.

Do you have a favourite character, if so, who?

As for choosing a favourite character – that’s hard when they are all my creations. In my first draft I suppose I really liked Lieke, the woman in the painting. But then I had fun with Katrijn and came to really like her a lot.

Several of your works have nameless narrators, is there a reason why you lean towards this?

I’m not sure why the nameless narrator seems to have become a thing. Maybe it’s to let the reader into the story; maybe it’s because a part of me is in each of these nameless narrators and I’m shy about admitting that; maybe it’s just that it helps throw focus onto the other characters.

What is a piece of advice you can give to new authors?

I feel very insecure about giving advice to new authors. Each writer will come to writing from their own place and they will find their own way of working that suits them. My way is not for everyone. I suppose if I had to say something to a new writer it would be to write, write, write! And to enjoy the writing.

What does your writing method look like?

My writing method is a little hard to pin down. I get an idea – a rather woolly idea. It rattles around in my head, making some noise till I feel compelled to put it down on paper. At the point of writing I have no idea where the project is going to go. I have just a vague idea that for some reason interests me; the process of writing takes me to where the book goes, like a voyage of discovery… and I am often surprised at the final destination. The actual writing involves a week or a little over a week of intense doing – 10 hour days at the computer, editing as I go. That’s it! However, for this book, ‘Woman in Blue’, almost the whole idea came to me one night. The woman in the painting broke my sleep and I lay half awake listening to her speaking to me. I sat up in bed, made some notes (12 pages of notes) and 2 hours later I fell asleep again. When it came to writing the book, I spent two long days putting the first draft together. Then at a later stage I took another day to ‘beef up’ one of the characters. I have no idea how I will write the next book.

This is the third novel we have published with you, and all share a few common themes such as the colour blue, angels, art, love. Do you find these themes the most natural to write about or is there a particular draw to these motifs?

I suppose writers have things that preoccupy them, things that creep into their work and provide a common thread to much of what they do. I do not think of myself as obsessed with the colour blue – actually, between you and me, I think my favourite colour is yellow! And I do seem to have done a lot of writing about art recently but it is not all I write about. As for angels… when already embarked on the writing of ‘Woman in Blue’ I paused to hunt around for a name that would fit the woman in the painting. I needed a Dutch name. I came across Lieke and it felt just right – it leaped out of a long list of Dutch names. So that’s what I called her and I went on with the writing. Only later, a chapter or so later, did I pause to look to see if the name maybe had a meaning behind it and I discovered that Lieke was short for Angelieke – angel-like. So you see, this ‘angel’ rather snuck into the book when my back was turned!

You’ve seen ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’ in person, did you immediately get the idea for your latest novella when you first saw the painting or did it come to you later?

No. But when I declared ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’ to be my favourite of Vermeer’s paintings something my wife said stuck in my head and niggled. It was this that, two days after I returned to Scotland, woke me in the middle of the night and the woman in the painting was talking to me. I had other projects that were in my head at the time, but the woman in blue barged her way in and as soon as I had a few empty days I began writing. Ideas can come from many different directions and I guess a lot don’t amount to anything; but then some do. I can’t explain the why and the wherefore of this.

If you could say anything to Angelieke what would you say?

Interesting question. If you had asked me this a month ago I would have had a different thing to say, but Lieke has been in my head again recently (something characters never do with me once they are written) and now I do want to return to her and to Katrijn. So if I had something to say to her now it would be: ‘Are we really to believe all you have said?’

What is your favourite piece of art?

This question I just cannot answer. It changes from day to day. ‘Woman in Blue’ is my favourite Vermeer painting but when I first saw it in Amsterdam my attention was taken away from it by a painting of Rembrandt’s. Despite what is said about Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ in my book ‘Woman in Blue’ it was this painting that caught my attention… there’s an almost sculptural quality to the application of the paint so that it is almost as if the woman and her husband could at any moment step down from the painting. It took my breath away when I first saw it. At 20 years of age I fell in love with G.F. Watts’ painting called ‘Hope’ – I have written about it in my book ‘Hope Never Knew Horizon’ – I loved it at 20 but I do not think I love it now. I love Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows’ and Hockney’s big paintings as well as his Yorkshire landscapes; and Picasso’s blue period paintings and his rose period paintings; and Titian’s ‘Venus Anadyomene’; and everything by Paula Rego… and oh my goodness that’s just what occurs to me today. Ask me again tomorrow and there’d be a whole different list. And I could go on and on talking about great paintings I have loved and love still. There’s just so much out there to love.

Woman in Blue published 2oth February 2025 and is available to order from Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Blackwell’s.

Read on for a small excerpt of Woman in Blue…

*

This never happens. Almost never. He wakes in the mid-night and the not-yet-morning and he wakes with a picture in his head. It is not the waking that never happens, for some nights the urgent weight of his bladder pulls him from sleep. Especially so on guild nights when he has drunk too much ale – there’s a cloth-covered beaten copper chamber pot beneath his bed for just such an eventuality. But it is not his bladder that has disturbed his sleep this night. It is the picture in his head that has woken him.
‘Do pictures speak?’ he wonders. ‘Do they shout loud as cattle drovers?’ For how else has the picture banished sleep? He can see it complete and finished, like a jewel, everything lit up blue and gold – all the colours of a day in summer. That’s how he sees it on waking. And there’s a woman in the picture and she is not aware that she is seen. There is something about the woman, he thinks. Something he recognises. At least it feels like recognition.
He opens his eyes on the darkness in the room. He listens, his ears sharp as dressmakers’ pins. He hears nothing at first, then the slow and heavy breath of his wife beside him in the bed; he hears the spaces between her breaths the loudest. Catharina is in the first months of her pregnancy. He hears the unfaltering ticking of the clock in the hall and the house shifting as houses do, the small cracks and clicks, the dance steps of tables and chairs. Maybe it is one o’clock or two; he would have to get out of bed to check on the time.
He turns in the bed, turns his back to his wife, who is asleep. He closes his eyes and the picture is before him again and the woman too; he sees that the woman is young and she is dressed in blue. She’s pretty, he thinks – but then aren’t all young women pretty to a man whose wife is pregnant and all out of shape and distant? The young woman’s hair is pinned up so he can see the gentle arc of her neck as she bends her head a little. He can see the clasp in her hair, the ribbons on the sleeves of her dress – is it a dress or a jacket she wears? She is reading a letter that she holds up to the light. Her lips are parted as though in reading she is also giving silent shape to the words.
It is an idea for a picture. That’s what he thinks. Perhaps it should be his next painting. He makes a note to himself to sketch out the picture in the morning. Then he looks again for sleep.
But he is unsettled. He knows enough about thoughts and ideas to understand that they are sometimes as fleeting and gossamer-thin as breath. He knows that when the bells of the Nieuwe Kerk ring out across the city to announce it is morning, all memory of the young woman wearing blue will have evaporated in the rush and run of things – the fire to be seen to, the children to dress, his wife asking him to make a decision about some small domestic matter of no consequence. And the woman in blue presses her demands on his attention now.
‘Who is she?’ he thinks. ‘Why does she exert such a pull on me? Is she someone I once knew, long before? Does she have a name? What is the letter she is reading?’
He opens his eyes again. He must get up and make some record of the picture. He knows doing that at least will fix it so that he can conjure it entire in his thoughts when he wakes again. He pushes back the bedcovers and swings his stockinged feet to the floor. He sits a moment, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. Then he pushes himself up from the bed, careful not to shake the wooden frame and wake his sleeping wife.
The air is chill and he sucks in breath, tastes metal or blood on his tongue.
He creeps from the bedroom, makes his way downstairs to the fire. There’s still a warm glow to be found in the coals if you look. He lights a thin taper and transfers the flame to a candle. Then back up the stairs to his studio. He sets the candle down on the table and takes up a fresh sheet of paper and a stick of chalk. He closes his eyes a moment to better see her – the woman in blue reading a letter. Then he fixes his attention on the act of sketching.
His hand moves easily across the paper, each line certain and sure and quick. It is to him as though the picture already exists on the page and all he is doing is revealing it, letting the light fall on her and on the letter she is reading. It takes him almost no time at all – or it takes him an hour that feels like no time. He is a little giddy and a little breathless from the work.
When he is done, he drops the chalk to the floor and, without looking at the drawing, takes up the candle again. He returns to his bed, snuffs out the candle flame and slips back under the covers. Catharina stirs. He holds his breath until he is sure she has settled and fallen deeper into sleep. He rests his head on the pillow and thinks again of the young woman in the picture.
‘It will be my best painting yet,’ he says to himself.
But he also knows that all middle-of-the-night ideas seem brilliant when considered in the dark between sleeping and waking – those same ideas in the cold light of day less so.
And the young woman in his picture – already he thinks of the painting as ‘his’ – who might she be? That he does not yet know.

Delft, early 1663