He's been a physics teacher and a literary editor. But last night Andrew Crumey was the winner of the country's biggest literary prize. He tells Lindsay Jennings why he doesn't take life too seriously.

I'M not sure what to expect when I arrange to meet Andrew Crumey. He has a PhD in theoretical physics, is a former literary editor and he's just won Britain's largest literary prize - a whopping £60,000 - so he can give up the day job to focus on his writing. Are we going to end up chatting about the theory of relativity or the Big Bang theory? Yes, as it happens.

When he answers the door of his Gosforth semi, Andrew is warm and welcoming and we move into the back room where a computer is giving off a luminous glare, a few lines dotted across the screen.

Winning the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award means he can afford to focus on his writing full time. For the last six years he's been juggling his part-time job as literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, commuting up to Edinburgh two days a week, as well as trying to write and look after his two children with his wife, Mary.

Andrew, 44, was born in Glasgow to working class parents. He describes them as intelligent people with a "questioning attitude" to life which they passed on to their son.

"I would question ideas and the way things were done," he says. "It gave me a slightly rebellious streak. In one sense I'm very conformist and suburban and banal but in an intellectual sense I'm a bit of a rebel."

He recalls his grandmother reading him stories as a child and he loved writing and "making things up".

But, he ended up pursuing a career in science - the words of his English teacher that "there's no money in novel writing" no doubt ringing in his ears. He left St Andrew's University with a first class honours degree in mathematics and theoretical physics and studied for a PhD before eventually becoming a research associate at Leeds University. He went as "far in science as I wanted to go" and settled in Newcastle, teaching maths and physics at Westfield School in Gosforth. In between lessons he would scribble down bits and pieces.

His first offering, Music in a Foreign Language, was published in 1994 and won the prestigious Saltire First Book Award. He can still remember reading his first review.

"There are various little moments that you cherish, like seeing it in print for the first time, but the real buzz was seeing it in a newspaper. It was only a tiny little review but it was really nice," he says.

His subsequent books - Pfitz, D'Alembert's Principle, Mr Mee and Mobius Dick - have all garnered good reviews, the accolades ranging from making the Booker Prize longlist to numerous Book of the Year honours.

There was even an embarrassing moment when he was chosen as one of Granta's best young British novelists four years ago - only to be told that, at 41, he was a year over the qualifying age.

"It was disappointing but at the same time funny. My publishers had entered me and I sort of disqualified myself. A lot of people said I should have lied about my age, but, you know..." he shrugs, philosophically.

"As a writer, you need these things in terms of getting exposure but if you take them too seriously then you're in trouble. Writing is a private, personal, intense thing and if you want to be able to do that you have to shut out all those things like awards and be true to what you're doing."

The book he's working on now, for which he received his Northern Rock award, is called Sputnik Caledonia and is about a young boy growing up in 1970s Scotland who embarks on a space mission. It melds quantum physics with telepathy and is the first novel he's written with a synopsis in mind.

"With all my other novels I would write bits and pieces and they would connect together and usually have several threads," he says. "With this one I wanted something which was a bit simpler but with more complex ideas going on."

He admits none of his books are commercially orientated.

"I write the books I want to write," he says. "Every writer sits down and writes the best they can do. If your interests are a bit esoterical, then OK you aren't going to please everybody, but there's still a lot of people who are going to be. With Sputnik Caledonia I want people to feel comfortable and not get too many shakes."

He pauses, a rebellious look flitting across his blue eyes. "But I'll lure them in with a false sense of simplicity."

As you might expect from a scientist, he writes "very methodically", sitting down at 9am when the children have gone to school, until about 3pm. He loved his job as a literary editor but will love dedicating all his time to his novel even more.

His books are a way of expressing his curiosity about the world, where the reader can learn one minute or be in the middle of a drama the next. "I'm interested in starting from the ideas and seeing what story comes from those ideas and how that becomes drama, that's my thing."

And what about aliens, I ask, possibly a little too abruptly. Does he believe there's something out there?

"Yes, why not, I think there has to be, the universe is just so big," he says. "But the idea of higher intelligence, people were saying that in the 18th century. I suppose one thing is we tend to look at it in terms of consciousness, that there are aliens out there who think like us, but they could communicate without consciousness."

He says he would love to believe in time travel too, pointing out that we already have time travel into the future in the way in which we speed through time zones, so you can arrive somewhere younger than you were. The past bit is complicated and he highlights the 'killing your grandmother' paradox, whereby if you go back in time and kill your grandmother how can you be born?

"The only way it can happen is if the past is the same as the future," he says. "For time travel to be possible you have to be able to change the past and to do that there has to be lots of pasts which is where you end up with parallel universes." The other thing, he says, is to think that everything is fatalistic, so we believe we can change things, when in fact our lives are already pre-determined.

"The problem with that is that Einstein's theory of relativity (which revolutionised the concept of space and time) says that, in principle, you can go into the past. What physics has concluded is that Einstein went wrong, that general relativity went wrong somewhere."

Andrew is an atheist and admits he is concerned at the way some schools teach creationism as the main theory behind how we came to be here.

He compares teaching creationism alongside evolution with children being taught about the Holocaust alongside David Irving's book which denies that the Holocaust ever happened.

"We would have mass protests if we did that," he says. "I think going in and saying here's creationism or here's evolution is making a very complex story simple and it's creating a false dichotomy for people and a lot of confusion."

Having been a literary editor, he's learned not to take the reviews too personally. "It's very tempting to think 'oh they've just got it in for me'," he laughs. "But that's not what it's about."

It also gave him a good insight into the book world and if his career continues to be successful, he's not likely to fall for the hype. In his spare time, he loves being with his family and gazing at the stars through his telescope, wondering, no doubt, what's out there. In the meantime, he's not in any danger of disappearing into the clouds. His books are described as being a mixture of history, philosophy science and humour - a bit like him. He was fun to chat to.

"Let's not take it too seriously," he smiles. "I think that's the moral of the story."