Jim Crace

James Crace (born 1 March 1946) is an English writer and novelist. His novels include Quarantine, which was judged Whitbread Novel of 1998, and Harvest, which won the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award, the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize.

Jim Crace
Jim Crace at the 2009 Texas Book Festival.
BornJames Crace
(1946-03-01) 1 March 1946
St Albans, England, United Kingdom
OccupationWriter, novelist
NationalityEnglish
Period1974–present
GenreRealistic fiction, historical fiction
Notable worksContinent, Quarantine, Being Dead, Harvest
SpousePamela Turton
Children2

Biography

Early life

Crace was born at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, while it was a maternity hospital. He grew up on an estate in Enfield, north London and attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London.[1][2] While at university, Crace edited and contributed to the Birmingham Sun, Aston University's student newspaper. He was awarded an external Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of London in 1968.

Immediately after graduating from university, Crace joined Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO) and was sent to Khartoum, Sudan. He traveled through Africa and briefly taught at a village school called Kgosi Kgari Sechele Secondary School in Molepolole, Botswana. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked for the BBC writing educational programmes.

Writing career

From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist, before giving up due to the excessive "political interference" he experienced at newspapers such as The Sunday Times.[3]

In 1974 he published his first work of prose fiction, Annie, California Plates in The New Review, and in the next 10 years would write a number of short stories and radio plays, including:

Continent, Crace's first book, was published in 1986. The book's sale to America enabled him to leave journalism and concentrate on writing books. Continent consists of seven stories united by their setting and themes. It won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction prize. New York Times critic Robert Olen Butler called it "brilliant, provocative and delightful".

Follow-up book The Gift of Stones is set in a village in the Neolithic period, while Quarantine is set in the Judean desert, 2000 years ago. The latter book won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1997, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was his 2013 novel Harvest. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, for Being Dead.

Personal life

Having lived many years in the Moseley area of Birmingham with his wife Pamela Turton, Crace now lives with her in rural Warwickshire.[6] They have two children, Thomas Charles Crace (born 1981) and the actress Lauren Rose Crace (born 1986), who played Danielle Jones in EastEnders.

Awards and honours

Works
  • Continent (seven stories) (1986)
  • The Gift of Stones (1988)
  • Arcadia (1992)
  • Signals of Distress (1994)
  • The Slow Digestions of the Night (short stories) (1995)
  • Quarantine (1997)
  • Being Dead (1999)
  • The Devil's Larder (64 short pieces) (2001)
  • Six (2003) (published in the US as Genesis)
  • The Pesthouse (2007)
  • On Heat (2008)
  • All That Follows (2010)
  • Harvest (2013)
  • The Melody (2018)
gollark: Oh, and it's not a special case as much as just annoying, but it's a compile error to not use a variable or import. Which I would find reasonable as a linter rule, but it makes quickly editing and testing bits of code more annoying.
gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course
gollark: What, you mean no it doesn't have weird special cases everywhere?

References
  1. Europa.bcu.ac.uk
  2. Vincent, Sally (24 August 2001). "Death and the optimist". The Guardian.
  3. Paris Review, 'Jim Crace, The Art of Fiction No. 179': "I had a falling out with the Sunday Times over what I took to be political interference. My report on the Broadwater Farm Estate, a mainly black housing project in Tottenham, North London, didn't match the editor's prejudices that it was a 'hellhole'." The Paris Review
  4. BBC
  5. BBC
  6. The Guardian
  7. "Authors join book prize's hall of fame". University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 23 August 2014.
  8. "Prize Citation for Jim Crace". Windham–Campbell Literature Prize. 7 March 2014. Retrieved 8 March 2014.
  9. Flood, Alison (17 June 2015). "Impac prize goes to 'consummate wordsmith' Jim Crace for Harvest". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 June 2015.

Further reading
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