Until recently, Adam Foulds's most useful qualification was his fork-lift-truck driving licence - a certificate which allowed him to earn enough as a warehouse assistant to pay the bills while leaving his head free to think about writing. On April 6, he put his fork-lift truck driver days behind him in accepting the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for his highly accomplished first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). The £5,000 award has long been seen as a prescient indicator of literary success: past winners include William Dalrymple, Zadie Smith and Simon Armitage.

Foulds, 33, a graduate of the University of East Anglia writing programme, faced strong competition — the short-list included Nikita Lalwani’s charming debut novel Gifted (Viking), James McConnachie’s deft history of the Kama Sutra, The Book of Love (Atlantic), and two-times nominee Robert Macfarlane, for his hauntingly poetic account of his travels in Britain’s outer reaches, The Wild Places (Granta). In the end, however, Foulds’s funny and moving story of the unlikely friendship between a runaway child genius and a fat, chain-smoking twenty-something Glaswegian, won him the unanimous backing of the three judges: Susannah Herbert, Andrew Holgate and Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times books pages. The work's display of descriptive prowess, comic bravura, sympathetic characterisation and outstanding dialogue - brought alive at the ceremony in a reading by the actor Anton Lesser - convinced them that Foulds is a new voice with an extraordinary future.

Q&A with Adam Foulds winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2008

What's the first book you remember reading?

I remember reading children's books about space and marine biology. I still remember the photos: the long scarf of a conger eel emerging from a crevice in a reef, its huge blunt jaws and teeth that were the more terrifying for being so tiny and so many. I remember beautiful portrait photographs of the planets. I remember one of the luminous mist of distant nebulae from which I struggled to infer the mind-defying distances involved. I much preferred pictures to words until quite late.

Where do you live? And why?

London. By birth and choice. London's so large and complicated that it takes a lot of learning. It would seem a waste of hard-won knowledge to move away. Also, I like its immediate sense of dynamism, of people from everywhere working to make their lives, a great combustion of human energy.

What's the greatest influence on your writing?

That's a very difficult question to try and answer. There's very little that isn't an influence in some way sooner or later. I suppose I come to understand my experience of the world by telling it back in my writing and therefore anything can be an influence. To answer the question in a different way, I'm guided by what I enjoy reading. I think I'm always trying to write a book that I know doesn't exist and that I myself would like to read.

Did you enjoy school? What is your most vivid memory of your school years?

School was fine. I was very well taught at senior school, getting much encouragement from the excellent English teachers who recur in other writers' biographies. I couldn't select a single most vivid memory from the 14 years or so.

Did you always want to be an author? If not, what did you originally want to be and when and why did you change your mind?

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