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
consider interested
I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.
almost avoid bitterness bound deliver retiring
Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.
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.
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.
good
I'm an atheist - a good old North Korean-style atheist.
acquired writers
I have in the past acquired a reputation for concocting non-existent writers and unwritten volumes.
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.
failings
I feel the political failings of the U.S.A. are presidential in length, but the aspirant narrative of the States is millennial in length.
I didn't go to university straight after school. I went at night.
assemblage canned chosen favourite gallery grandest largest louvre shop variety
There is no reason why the Louvre should be your favourite gallery just because it has the grandest collections in France, any more than Kew should necessarily be a favourite garden because it has the largest assemblage of plants, or Tesco your chosen shop because it has the widest variety of canned beans.
love
We're all blemished. Yet we do love and are loved.
background brought estate
When I was a youngster, I was brought up in a very political background on an estate in north London.
asked books deliver drive people side van work
When people asked me what I did, I'd say, 'I work in publishing', and when they then say, 'What side of it?', I say, 'Supply' - no doubt leaving them to think I drive the books around in a van and deliver them.