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
life
Retiring from writing is not to retire from life.
absence allowed features freelance hinder journalist neither nor orderly presence sixteen taught
Sixteen years as a freelance features journalist taught me that neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book.
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I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.
itself knocking narrative starts
When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.
dad education formal lots main man people vocabulary whatever wonderful
My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
I should have been kinder when I was younger.
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.
thrilled
Privately, I'm thrilled with what I do, but publicly, I hold it in disdain.
defending politics
English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
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.
heads nativity school shepherds towels
Almost everyone who's been to primary school in Britain has had towels put on their heads to play the shepherds in the nativity play.
age based convention mirrors wants
There's a convention that books are mirrors of the real world, but our fact-obsessed age also wants fiction to be factually based and trustworthy.
beneath english thousand
You stand beneath the arthritic boughs of any English oak, and you survey a thousand tales.
appears christ western
The western view of Christ is usually of a stainless being with fair hair who appears to have come from Oslo.