Jim Crace
Jim Crace
James "Jim" Craceis an award-winning English writer. His novels include Quarantine, which was judged Whitbread Novel of 1998, and Harvest, which won the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 March 1946
country deeply prefer
I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.
advances contract extent good impulse job looking lucky sitting work worried
After 25 years sitting on my own in a room, I was looking for a more companionable job and wanted to work more collaboratively. I've also been very lucky in my career, with good advances and multibook deals. But there is some extent to which I worried that I was writing for the contract and not for the impulse of the thing itself.
money prizes validation
I know the money is important, but, actually, the validation of your career that prizes give is what you really want. But the money is fabulous, too.
defending politics
English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
colleague friday good reach target weekend weekly word work
Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.
narrative
I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.
aware driven hours less pregnant share suffer text wake writers
I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.
avoided danger despised english life
I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.
entitled list
I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.
amusing bizarre cowardly fists instead people stories
My tongue is what I used instead of my fists because I was a small and cowardly young man. Amusing people with stories and being bizarre with words was my way of getting out of fixes.
bitter moaning people writers
I'm not going to write any more novels. I don't want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don't want that.
prizes sell
I've been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn't sell any books.
kept likely spectators visitors
For all the splendours of the world's greatest galleries, visitors are likely to be kept at arm's length, spectators of a world that can seem too rarefied to let them in.
associated dull finding hold hysteria interested narrative normally religion taking truth
I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.