Jim Crace biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Jim Crace
Photo © www.andrewbainbridge.co.uk

Jim Crace

Jim Crace Biography

Jim Crace is the author of many novels including Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year; shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (2001 National Book Critics’ Circle Award), The Devil’s Larder, Six, The Pesthouse, All That Follows and Harvest. His novels have been translated into twenty-six languages.

He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1999; he has also received the E.M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England where he is a keen amateur birdwatcher and also enjoys live music at small venues.

Jim Crace's website

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Interview

Author Jim Crace talks with Lisa Guidarini about his decision to retire from fiction writing, the biggest influences in his long and storied career, and how his novel Harvest is wrapped around timeless themes.

Harvest seems to be set in an era when English society is evolving from use of land to grow crops to enclosed pastures for animals. What about this specific time period did you find compelling as a setting for your novel? Could it have been set in any other time and place?
The time period isn't all that specific, in fact. I wasn't trying to write a novel that was medieval or Tudor or Jacobean. If the novel has a "setting" at all then it's Shakespeare's England. So it's prose fiction based on stage fiction. But, if the exact time and location of the story are not important to me, the subject matters are. And the subject matters are timeless. Small farmers all over the world are still being forced from their land, edged out by timber sharks or soy barons or coffee magnates or housing developers. And those farmers may well end up as refugees or asylum seekers in towns or cities which resent them. So, yes, this novel could have been set in any other time or place – except for the fact that I had a local and personal reason to make it "Shakespearean." I live in Warwickshire -"Shakespeare's County" as the tourist board call it – only half an hour from Stratford-upon-Avon. And the fields where I most commonly walk are ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Jim Crace at BookBrowse
The Melody jacket Harvest jacket All That Follows jacket The Pesthouse jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Jim Crace but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Elizabeth Berg

    Elizabeth Berg

    Elizabeth Berg is the author of many bestselling novels, including Open House (an Oprah's Book Club selection), Talk Before Sleep, and The Year of Pleasures, as well as the short story collection The Day I Ate Whatever I... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Melody

    Try:
    The Story of Arthur Truluv
    by Elizabeth Berg

  • Goldie Goldbloom

    Goldie Goldbloom

    Goldie Goldbloom is an Australian novelist and short story writer. Her novel The Paperbark Shoe won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Fiction and the Foreword Magazine Novel of the Year. She's been ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Harvest

    Try:
    The Paperbark Shoe
    by Goldie Goldbloom

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