ANDREW CRUMEY

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics. He was director of West London Nightline and a caregiver at Westminster Mencap. He moved to Newcastle in 1992 and began working as a mathematics teacher in secondary schools. However, in 1996, he began writing book reviews. He has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and other newspapers. He regularly participates in literary and scientific conferences.

As a writer, he has long been recognized as a distinctive voice in Scottish literature. He is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into fifteen languages. He has received two prestigious literary awards, the Saltire Award and the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award. For several years, he worked as an editor for Scotland on Sunday and as a research fellow at the Durham Institute for Advanced Studies. He currently teaches creative writing at Northumbria University in Newcastle and regularly reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Philosophy, history, science and music are among the themes that preoccupy Andrew Crumey’s fiction. Finding the term “novel of ideas” too constricting, he prefers the expression “somewhat philosophical novel.” Crumey’s first book, Music in a Foreign Language, was published in 1994. He soon published two more books: Pfitz (1995) and D’Alembert’s Principle (1996). Pfitz was a New York Times Notable Book, while D’Alembert’s Principle was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2000, he published the novel Mr Mee, followed by Möbius Dick in 2004. Crumey won the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award, the largest literary prize in the United Kingdom, for his novel Sputnik Caledonia, published in 2008. The only Crumey novel to date translated into Serbian, Secret Knowledge, was published in 2013. His eighth book, The Great Chain of Unbeing, was published in 2018.