Jim Crace

James Crace (born 1 March 1946) is an English novelist, playwright and short story writer. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999, Crace was born in Hertfordshire and has lectured at the University of Texas at Austin. His novels have been translated into 28 languages—including Norwegian, Japanese, Portuguese and Hebrew. In 2013, Crace said his father was "a curmudgeonly leftwing atheist who... was open-hearted in the big things and narrow and doctrinaire in every other respect". There he was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Keep Left but did not attend to his A-Levels.

Personal life Having spent many years living in the Moseley area of Birmingham with his wife Pamela Turton, Crace announced when they were 67 years of age that they would be moving to rural Worcestershire, "you're supposed to want to downsize, but we actually want to upsize", he commented. Crace went on to become a grandfather. A Coat of Many Colours, a radio play, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 24 March 1979.

Crace has been a socialist throughout his life, though this is not evident from his published fiction. He also admits to forgetting details from his own books.

Signals of Distress was published in 1994. Set in the nineteenth century, it features an African slave stranded on the outskirts of an English village and Aymer Smith, who will set it free. Quarantine was published in 1997. It depicts Jesus in the Judean desert. Six, which Crace admits is one of his least successful books, was published in 2003, flawed by his inability to concentrate wholly on it as his mother slowly died from dementia and cancer and the effort extracted by his being her primary carer.

Having "retired" from writing novels after Harvest, Crace reemerged in 2018 with The Melody. An elderly widower, curious as to what is rattling his bins at night, ventures out to investigate and is leapt upon and bitten by a creature he senses is different from the dogs or deer to which he is accustomed. On this occasion, it is, he is sure, a boy. eden was published in 2022. It is set in the eponymous Garden, following the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

On his writing experience Crace has stated: "With writing there is a moment of abandonment for me... particularly if you're not an autobiographical writer, and you're wanting this intuitive thing to bubble up, and to lead the story to places you don't expect it to go, then you have to wait for the moment of abandonment, because if you don't, these things aren't going to happen. I love that moment of abandonment, when a story starts to take over and take its own direction."

The University of Texas has purchased Crace's archive. 1986: Guardian Fiction Prize, for Continent 1989: GAP International Prize for Literature, for The Gift of Stones 1994: Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, for Signals of Distress 1996: American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award 2001: International Dublin Literary Award shortlist, for Quarantine 2013: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Harvest 2013: Booker Prize shortlist, for Harvest 2014: Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction), valued at $150,000 one of the largest prizes in the world of its kind. 2015: International Dublin Literary Award, for Harvest