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
careers gets hundred immensely
Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.
basically entity stands work writers
Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
ahead british city closest counties deep fear foul hiking historic home mud narrow whether
The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks.
arrival ended land landscape lives
As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.
detailed invented mostly
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
dickens likely neither whom
I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens - neither of whom I've yet read.
bourgeois full metaphors rhythmic sinking
I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart.
stopped
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
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.