Jim Crace

Jim Crace was born in Hertforshire, in southern England, and grew up in London. He graduated from the University of London in 1968, after which he joined Britain’s Voluntary Services Overseas and worked as an educational television assistant in Khartoum, Sudan. Upon his return home he worked for the BBC and then spent twenty years as a freelance journalist, in which profession he learned that “neither the absence of 'the Muse' nor the presence of 'the block' should be allowed to hinder the orderly progress of a book,” according to the British Council. Crace published Continent, a series of interconnected stories, in 1986, followed by several novels, of which Harvest is one of the most recent. His novel Being Dead won the National Book Critics Circle Award, two of his books (Quarantine and Harvest) have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Crace won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2014. He lives in Birmingham, England, with his wife and two children.