Andrew Crumey (born 1961) is a novelist and former literary editor of the Edinburgh newspaper Scotland on Sunday . His works of literary fiction incorporate elements of speculative fiction, historical fiction, philosophical fiction and Menippean satire. Brian Stableford has called them "philosophical fantasies". [1] The Spanish newspaper El Mundo called Crumey "one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years." [2]
Crumey was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and grew up in Kirkintilloch. He graduated with First Class Honours from the University of St Andrews and holds a PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College, London. His thesis was on integrable systems and Kac-Moody algebras, supervised by David Olive. [3]
Crumey's first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language , won the Saltire Society First Book Award in 1994. [4] Its theme of alternate history was inspired by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. [5]
His second novel Pfitz was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" in 1997, described as "cerebral but warm and likeable". [6] The sequel, D'Alembert's Principle took its title from a principle of physics.
Crumey was a regular book reviewer for Scotland on Sunday from 1996 and became the newspaper's literary editor in 2000. He won an Arts Council of England Writers' Award, worth £7,000. [7]
In 2000 Crumey's fourth novel Mr Mee was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. [8] He followed it with Mobius Dick , described by Joseph O'Connor as "perhaps the only novel about quantum mechanics you could imagine reading while lying on a beach." [9]
In 2003 Crumey was selected for Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists", but had been incorrectly submitted by publisher Picador, being over 40 at the time. [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. [13]
In 2006 he became lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University. In 2011 he was a visiting fellow at Durham Institute of Advanced Study, [14] then became lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University. [5] It was during this time that he wrote The Secret Knowledge, published in 2013. [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. [19]
His short story Singularity was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2016 [20] and later published in The Great Chain of Unbeing .
In 2017 he was a contestant in the St Andrews team on BBC Two's Christmas University Challenge. [21]
In 2018 The Great Chain of Unbeing was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Award. [22] Adam Roberts wrote in Literary Review: 'Andrew Crumey’s new book is a quasi-novel built out of connected short stories. It’s something for which we English have no specific term, but for which German critics have probably coined an impressively resonant piece of nomenclature (Kurzgeschichtenverkettung, maybe?). It’s as good an example of the form as I know.'
In 2023 he published his ninth novel, Beethoven's Assassins , described in The Irish Times as "a deliciously intellectual, ambitious book that explores time, metaphysics, narrative and pretty much everything, all at once." [23]
Jonathan Coe described Crumey as "a writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble... Crumey seems so untouched by the post-war British tradition that he simply writes as if it never existed." [24]
The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, commenting on unorthodox approaches to genre fiction by writers including Crumey, Frank Kuppner and Ken Macleod, said "Andrew Crumey is one of the most innovative and engaging Scottish writers to emerge out of this context in the last twenty years. 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." [25]
In Twenty-First-century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices, Daniel Lea put Crumey in a list of "post-postmodernist" British writers that included Iain Banks, Bernardine Evaristo and Neil Gaiman, characterised by an "intermingling of genre and literary fiction." [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". Sorensen wrote that Crumey was "opposed to the postmodern epistemology when asked to define his world-view in philosophical terms... his fictional practice, however, can still fairly be characterized as postmodern." [27]
Timothy C. Baker described Crumey's novels as "monadological", citing Deleuze's reading of Leibniz, and observing that "The relation between [Crumey's] novels is unusual: five of his seven novels explore, in various ways, the legacies of Enlightenment thought, often drawing upon the same ideas and figures. These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct." [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. [30]
William Angus McIlvanney was a Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet. He was known as Gus by friends and acquaintances. McIlvanney was a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as "the father of Tartan Noir" and as Scotland's Camus.
Bettina von Arnim, born Elisabeth Catharina Ludovica Magdalena Brentano, was a German writer and novelist.
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Andrew O'Hagan is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author. Three of his novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize and he has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Leila Fuad Aboulela is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and moved to Scotland in 1990 where she began her literary career. Until 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela’s works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).
Dedalus Books is an independent publishing company based in Cambridgeshire, England. Publisher Eric Lane has said, "We like the bizarre, the grotesque, the surreal and the clever, preferably in the same book. We call this kind of book, distorted reality. For instance David Madsen’s Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf, Sylvie Germain’s The Book of Night and Vladimir Sharov’s Before and During. Three perfect examples of what we are looking for." Prize-winning Dedalus writers have included novelist Andrew Crumey and translator Margaret Jull Costa.
Sputnik Caledonia (2008) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, for which he won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award, the UK's largest literary prize at the time.
Scotland's National Book Awards, formerly known as the Saltire Society Literary Awards, are made annually by the Saltire Society. First awarded in 1937, they are awarded for books by Scottish authors or about Scotland, and are awarded in several categories.
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Mobius Dick (2004) is a novel by Andrew Crumey. It features an alternate world in which Nazi Germany has invaded Great Britain and Erwin Schrödinger failed to find the wave equation that bears his name. This world becomes connected to our world due to experiments with quantum computers. The title parodies Moby-Dick.
Pfitz is a 1997 novel by Scottish physicist and author Andrew Crumey. It concerns an 18th-century German prince who dedicates his life to the construction of imaginary cities. The name Pfitz is taken from an inhabitant of one of the prince's fanciful cities, Rreinnstadt.
Quantum fiction is a genre of speculative fiction that reflects modern experience of the material world and reality as influenced by quantum theory and new principles in quantum physics. It is characterized by the use of an element in quantum mechanics as a storytelling device. The genre is not necessarily science-themed, and blurs the line separating science fiction and fantasy into a broad scope of mainstream literature that transcends the mechanical model of science and involves the fantasy of human perception or imagination as realistic components affecting the everyday physical world.
The Secret Knowledge (2013) is the seventh novel by Scottish writer Andrew Crumey. It was his first since returning to his original UK publisher Dedalus Books, and was awarded a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Part of the writing was done while the author was visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study. It was longlisted for the Guardian's "Not the Booker" prize.
Claire Askew is a Scottish novelist and poet.
Dina Salústio is a novelist from Cabo Verde, who is the first woman from the country to publish a novel, and the first writer from the country to have a novel translated to English.
Music, in a Foreign Language is the first novel by physicist Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 1994. It won the Saltire Society First Book Award for that year, in a ceremony broadcast on STV.
The Great Chain of Unbeing is the eighth fiction book by Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 2018. It was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book Awards and nominated for the British Science Fiction Awards. The title alludes to the great chain of being and the book consists of stories that range widely in theme and style but are subtly linked. The book has been variously interpreted as a short story collection or novel.
D'Alembert's Principle is a novel by Andrew Crumey, and the second in a sequence of three set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century. It is in three sections, subtitled "Memory, Reason and Imagination". The U.S. edition was subtitled "A novel in three panels". It has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Italian, Turkish and Romanian. It prompted El Mundo (Spain) to say "Crumey is one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."
Mr Mee is a novel by Andrew Crumey, his third set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century. It has three alternating story-lines: one featuring a pair of 18th-century French copyists, and two with modern protagonists - elderly Scottish book collector Mr Mee and university lecturer Dr Petrie. The lecturer's strand is serious in tone. Dissatisfied with his marriage and suffering ill health, he muses on French literature and becomes infatuated with a student. The other two strands are comic. The copyists become guardians of an esoteric encyclopaedia, and Mr Mee wishes to find it. He turns to the World Wide Web and discovers pornography and drugs, with farcical consequences.
Beethoven's Assassins is a novel by Andrew Crumey, nominated by publisher Dedalus Books for the 2023 Booker Prize. It imagines Beethoven being commissioned by a masonic lodge to write an opera about the Order of Assassins, called "The Assassins, or Everything is Allowed". The opera's subtitle comes from "Nothing is true and everything is allowed", which was the Assassins' secret doctrine according to Beethoven's acquaintance Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall.
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