Andrew Crumey



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Andrew Crumey (pronounced "Croomy") has a PhD in theoretical physics and is former literary editor of Scotland on Sunday. His novels combine history, philosophy, science and humour, and have been praised and translated worldwide. He was 2006 winner of the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writers Award, the UK's largest literary prize, for his novel Sputnik Caledonia.

His debut novel, Music, in a Foreign Language, won the Saltire First Book Award and was longlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. His fourth novel Mr Mee (2000) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and IMPAC Award and won a Scottish Arts Council book award. Mobius Dick (2004) was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was chosen by Waterstones for its "alternative Booker" shortlist. Other prizes include an Arts Council Writer's Award and Northern Arts Writer's Award.

Andrew Crumey's novels have been translated into fifteen languages. He regularly appears at literary and science festivals, and teaches at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Music In A Foreign Language,
album released 2003 by
Lloyd Cole 		                                              Cecil Crumey,
character in the Japanese
television series Code Geass

Biography

Born in Scotland in 1961, Andrew Crumey grew up in Kirkintilloch and studied theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University, where he was awarded class medals in both subjects and graduated with first class honours. He moved to London in 1983 to do a PhD in theoretical physics at Imperial College. He then considered a career in social work, and between 1986 and 1989 was director of West London Nightline and care worker with Westminster Mencap, but he returned to research to do post-doctoral work on nonlinear systems at Imperial College and Leeds University. In 1992 he moved to Newcastle upon Tyne (where he still lives with his wife and two children) and worked as a schoolteacher for four years. He became a regular book reviewer for Scotland on Sunday in 1996 and was the newspaper's literary editor from 2000 to 2006, giving up the post when he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award.

Novels

Music, in a Foreign Language, published in 1994, tells the story of a physicist and an historian in a totalitarian Britain that became communist after Nazi occupation during the Second World War. It was inspired by a research visit Crumey made to Wroclaw in Poland, not long after the fall of communism, where the institute of theoretical physics was situated in the former local communist party headquarters. Alternative history and parallel realities are a recurring theme in Crumey's books, stemming from the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory which he learned as an undergraduate.

Crumey's first novel also set the scene for his subsequent output through its numerous references or allusions to earlier literary works. This, along with the novel's non-linear, inter-textual structure, led one critic to bill him as a "master of postmodernist irony".

Crumey continued to be identified as a postmodernist writer with the rapid publication of his next two novels, Pfitz (1995) and D'Alembert's Principle (1996). Both look back to the eighteenth century: Pfitz incorporates a pastiche of Denis Diderot's Jacques The Fatalist, and Diderot appears as a character in D'Alembert's Principle (which tells the tragic love story of Diderot's friend, the mathematician Jean le Rond D'Alembert).

Mr Mee was published in 2000. It narrowly missed the Booker shortlist, was longlisted for the IMPAC Award, and Crumey won an Arts Council Writer's Award in that year. In late 2002 he was selected for Granta's "best young British novelists" on the strength of Mr Mee, which his publisher had entered without noticing the author was over the 40-year age limit; Crumey pointed out the error and disqualified himself.

Mr Mee shows a favourite feature of Crumey's work, which is his taste for combining three narrative strands. Critics were impressed by the dense layering of ideas in a fast-paced and highly humorous story which managed to combine philosophical speculation and low farce. Mr Mee involves the search for Rosier's Encyclopaedia; a lost book describing an alternative world. This has echoes with Borges's story "Tlon, Uqbar, Tertius Orbis", and one reviewer noted that the opening of Mr Mee actually echoes Borges's by way of a clue.

The same trick appears in Mobius Dick, whose opening line parallels Melville's Moby-Dick. Here, though, the strands are more intricately connected to create a mixture of techno-thriller, historical fiction and sci-fi. Published in 2004, Mobius Dick was both a critical and commercial success. The first edition quickly sold out and had to be reprinted; the book reached Amazon's top fifty bestseller list.

Sputnik Caledonia, published in March 2008 to equally warm reviews, incorporates semi-autobiography, a more expansive style, and a character-driven story whose impact is emotional as well as intellectual. To that extent it marks a significant departure, though the story of young Robbie Coyle - and his Wizard-Of-Oz-like relocation to a parallel world where he trains as Scotland's first cosmonaut - revisits the mythology of Mobius Dick and Music, In A Foreign Language. While Mobius Dick and Pfitz harked back to E.T.A. Hoffmann, the literary background to Sputnik Caledonia is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and it can be seen as a postmodern take on the classic "novel of formation".