Andrew Crumey

He graduated with First Class Honours from the University of St Andrews and holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College, London.

[7] In 2000 Crumey's fourth novel Mr Mee was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award.

[10] In 2006, Crumey became the fifth recipient of the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award for Sputnik Caledonia,[11] which was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize[12] and Scottish Book of the Year.

[15] His PhD students at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities have included Alex Lockwood,[16] Guy Mankowski[17] and John Schoneboom[18] He has an interest in astronomy and in 2014 he published on the subject of astronomic visibility and Ricco's law.

His speculative fiction has a strong European and global dimension, drawing on the influence of Borges, Calvino and Milorad Pavic in its intricate, nested narratives, non-linearity, and ludic encyclopaedism.

"[26] Bent Sorensen bracketed Crumey with another physicist-turned-novelist, Alan Lightman, and discussed their move from science to literature using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of "field", "position-taking" and "gatekeeping".

"[28] Cultural theorist Sonia Front wrote, "The notion of parallel universes seems to be Andrew Crumey's favourite physical theory... His writings can be seen as a multiverse themselves, with the characters reappearing to live an alternative world-line in another novel.

"[29] Florian Kläger sees "a self-reflexive cosmopoetics of the novel" in the writings of Crumey, Martin Amis, John Banville, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson.