A year later he returned to the UK, where he worked for a time at the BBC. He joined Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), and was based in Sudan. He ended up at the Birmingham College of Commerce. There he was involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Keep Left but did not attend to his A-Levels. Ĭrace grew up at Enfield, London and attended Enfield Grammar School.

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. 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'. was open-hearted in the big things and narrow and doctrinaire in every other respect. His father he described in 2013 as 'a great walker and birder, a curmudgeonly leftwing atheist who. He was awarded a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in 2015.Ĭrace was born in 1946 at the neo-classical Hertfordshire country house of Brocket Hall, while it served as a maternity hospital. Harvest was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, won the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and won the 2015 International Dublin Literary Award.Ĭrace received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. Being Dead won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999.

His next novel, Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize of the same year. Signals of Distress won the 1994 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Ĭrace's first novel, Continent, was published in 1990. His novels have been translated into 28 languages-including Norwegian, Japanese, Portuguese and Hebrew. 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. James Crace FRSL (born 1 March 1946) is an English novelist, playwright and short story writer.

Devils Larder by Jim Crace