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.
Crace's first novel, Continent, was published in 1990. Signals of Distress won the 1994 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. His next novel, Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize of the same year. Being Dead won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999. Harvest was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, won the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and won the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award.
Crace received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1996. He was awarded a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in 2015.
Early life
Crace was born in 1946 at the neo-classical Hertfordshire country house of Brocket Hall, while it served as a maternity hospital. His father he described in 2013 as "a great walker and birder, a curmudgeonly leftwing atheist who... was open-hearted in the big things and narrow and doctrinaire in every other respect... I loved my father to bits and as his life was walking, lawn care, politics, books and tennis I have totally turned into him, because those are now the five notes of my life as well". An edition of Roget's Thesaurus that his father gave him as a Christmas present when he was 11 Crace retained as a "constant companion, my best possession", throughout his life.
Crace grew up at Enfield, London and attended Enfield Grammar School. There he was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Keep Left but did not attend to his A-Levels. He ended up at the Birmingham College of Commerce. He joined Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), and was based in Sudan. A year later he returned to the UK, where he worked for a time at the BBC.
Between 1976 and 1987, Crace worked as a freelance journalist, including for The Sunday Times and the Radio Times, before quitting due an experience at The Sunday Times, where his report on the Broadwater Farm riot did not receive the acclaim of his editor, owing to his unwillingness to describe in sufficient detail the hell-like features of this estate.
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. He described Birmingham as somewhere "we've always hung in there because we thought it politically important to be in a place where the future is being mapped out, rather than the past being replayed, which is what happens if you go to a Cotswolds village".
Crace and Turton have two children, Thomas Charles Crace (born 1981) and the actress Lauren Rose Crace (born 1986), who played Danielle Jones in EastEnders. Crace went on to become a grandfather.
A scientific atheist and modern Darwinist, he is a former member of the British Labour Party, but left in a dispute over its stance on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Influences
Crace has expressed his admiration for Günter Grass, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, adding "Less so Kundera, more so the Latin American magical realists".
Writing
In 1974 Crace published his first work of prose fiction, "Annie, California Plates" in The New Review, and in the next 10 years would write a number of short stories and radio plays, including: Helter Skelter, Hang Sorrow, Care'll Kill a Cat, The New Review (December 1975), reprinted in Cosmopolitan and included in Introduction 6: Stories by new writers, Faber and Faber (1977); Refugees, winner of the Socialist Challenge short story competition (judges: John Fowles, Fay Weldon, Terry Eagleton), Socialist Challenge (1977); Seven Ages; Quarto (June 1980), broadcast as Middling by BBC Radio 3. The Bird Has Flown, a radio play, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 28 October 1976. 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 stated: "I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart". He also admits to forgetting details from his own books.