It shouldn't come as a surprise to hear a novelist spends a lot of time with prison on his mind. The archetypal image of the solitary existence of a writer, holed up in a room with a blank page, waiting for inspiration, is surely a metaphor for forced confinement.

Martin Cathcart Froden was so affected by his experiences as a lecturer in English and creative writing at HM Prison Greenock, it has taken his work off in a whole new direction. Now undertaking a PhD at the University of Glasgow, the MLitt graduate and recent winner of the Dundee International Book Prize is focusing on a creative response to prison architecture.

"It is a really powerful environment to just go in for a day. In the class everyone was quite nice; we talked about books. I could make their life better by having a nice time when we were doing it but I couldn't affect their life more than that. I tried to work out, why am I feeling so 'Ohhh'," the 37-year-old says, lifting his hands to his head.

"At first I thought, is it the weather? I used to cycle back from there. But I hadn't quite realised the power of the building and the architecture."

Sitting by the full-length window of Stravaigin in Glasgow's West End, watching the world go by outside, he looks around: "This is a lovely place, which is why we met here and not McDonald's. I got really interested in what it must be like to live in a space for a long time if you have no chance of changing it."

The outcome will be published in a new novel. Before then, his first book Devil Take the Hindmost is out next year, after beating 500 other entrants from around the world to win the Dundee International Book Prize. As well as a cash prize of £10,000, the award gives Froden a publishing deal with Glasgow-based Freight Books to bring the story of a hapless Scot newly arrived in London in the 1920s who finds himself embroiled in a world of moneylenders and cycling race fixing, to the public.

It was produced while Swedish-born Froden, who has only been writing fiction in English for five years, studied for his MLitt in Glasgow. Then edited and fine-tuned on two-hour lunch breaks in Greenock.

"You couldn't really leave. Well, it was such a faff it wasn't worth it. I just printed the book and sat and read and edited it. I guess it's a place designed so that there is absolutely nothing else to do – even though I was perfectly innocent," he laughs, holding up his hands.

With a CV that includes fruit picker, greengrocer, sound engineer and magazine editor, it all makes his current work as a PhD student, with an office in an ornate university tenement building in the heart of the west end, all seem rather mundane.

"I quite enjoy change, I suppose. And I've moved around a lot too, so I guess you need to do something wherever you are," he agrees.

"The avocado picking was when I lived on a kibbutz in Israel that was 500 metres from Lebanon and 500 metres from the Mediterranean. It was a beautiful setting in a really dangerous place. The locals were all like: 'Oh, it's just rockets, you know. It's just Hezbollah'.

"The border was among hills and they called the area where the kibbutz was rocket shadow, so they thought they were really safe because of the trajectory. But that's not something to write home about: Mum, I'm safe, I'm in rocket shadow."

Froden grew up in the east of Sweden, just south of Stockholm, with his younger biological sister and adopted twins.

"I've got quite a funny family. My mum and dad adopted two children from Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa. They are not related but they are not sure when they were born because they were from an orphanage. On paper they are twins but they're not related in any way," he explains.

He was 12 by the time the twins, babies at the time, arrived in the family home. Though his parents' marriage broke up during the lengthy adoption process, Froden has memories of a happy, busy home.

"I think it's odd having any sibling, both odd and great. I don't know if I was mature enough to understand what was going to happen. I've never thought too much about it. It wasn't a big upheaval, it was just like having more people in the house. I think we get on really well as a family," he says.

That spirit of embracing change took Froden off to Canada's Vancouver Island as an exchange student at the age of 17. Returning to Sweden to study linguistics. "I realised I wasn't very good at it – and I don't know who would be," he says.

The trip to Israel followed, and then six months in Buenos Aires before returning to Sweden to work as a sound engineer and live north of the Arctic Circle on the border with Finland.

An internship at a recording studio brought him to London, where Froden met his Glaswegian wife Lucy. They lived in Sweden for a while, where their son was born, and then moved to Glasgow where the two younger children came into the world. The couple had been part of Glasgow band Tall Tales – "half of the band has moved away, so it's on hold for the moment" – though Froden says he feels with writing he gets enough of a creative output.

Though Froden's father is a businessman, he says growing up he wasn't short of creative influences with his musical mother who sung in choirs, and his sister who is an illustrator.

"My mum is really arty, we talk a lot about culture and she reads a lot and my dad is an entrepreneur. I guess if you mixed them, being a writer kind of makes sense. You have to be self-propelled and believe in what you do. No-one is going to ask you to do it, you have to work out your own deadlines," he says.

Now Froden is collaborating with a photographer, writing pieces of fiction for his pictures.

"He takes a lot of photos of scarecrows and has a whole series of really quite sinister-looking ones. I had a brief look at the photos and wrote a story," he explains.

"He also works on an oil rig. I've not told him yet but I'm working on an oil rig piece that I'm going to send to him so that it is not always me responding to his photos. Now he has to change what he takes pictures of.

"It ties in with the prison work: it's a very male environment, you're cut off from civilisation, you live in a little cell, and it's a dry environment – there's no alcohol. It's a monk-like existence, or voluntary prison."