Jim Crace

British novelist Jim Crace began his career writing scripts for children’s television and later moved on to journalism. The sale of his first novel, Continent, allowed him to write fiction full-time. The author of more than a dozen books, including Quarantine, Being Dead, and last year’s Harvest, Crace has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Whitbread Prize, and he has been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He writes in a form that has been described as both “dislocated realism” and “uncanny fabulism.” The author calls it simply, “Craceland.” Drawing on a rich tradition of English pastoral, Renaissance grotesquerie, and chiaroscuro, his novels range across and rejuvenate genres as diverse as the dystopian novel, the quest novel, the medieval bestiary, and the fabliaux. In a review of Harvest, the New York Times writes, “In his compassionate curiosity and his instincts for insurgent uncertainty, Crace surely ranks among our greatest novelists of radical upheaval, a perfect fit for our unstable, unforgiving age.”