Jim Crace

One of Britain's most celebrated novelists, Jim Crace was born in 1946 and raised in Enfield, on the outskirts of north London, where the sprawling urban landscape met the open fields. 'Our flat was practically the last building in London,' Crace recalls. 'Maybe that's why I became obsessed with the urban/rural divide.' His commitment to left-wing politics and his love of the natural world were both acquired early on, in part from his father, 'a bird-watcher, a socialist, a planter of trees who oaked the public land'. In Crace's early novels especially, the personal becomes the political, as tight-knit communities find their age-old way of life threatened by the forces of progress. His settings, which range from the Judean desert in Quarantine to a Stone Age village in The gift of stones to his present home-city of Birmingham in Arcadia, are always vividly realised. 'I see myself as a landscape writer,' Crace says. 'There are interesting landscapes to be explored both in and out of the city.'

Jim Crace's connection to Birmingham and the West Midlands dates from 1965, when he enrolled at the Birmingham College of Commerce as an external student of London University. After graduating he spent five years in the Sudan with the VSO, then returned to Britain and settled in Birmingham, where he has lived ever since. The contemporary crisis in Birmingham's metal and engineering trades provided the impetus for his early novel The gift of stones (1988). Discussing the origins of this book, Crace said: 'I was very interested in what would happen to a community based on work which was suddenly separated from that certainty'. Characteristically, however, he chose to set his story not in a Birmingham factory but in the distant past, in a Stone Age village famous for its ability to work stone into tools of exquisite quality. The discovery of bronze threatens the villagers' traditional way of life, and the village goes into decline.

Many British readers recognised Birmingham as the setting for his third novel, Arcadia(1992), in which a traditional open-air produce market is 'urban-renewed' out of the city centre to make way for a modern glass-and-concrete shopping mall. However, one proof of the book's universality is the extent to which reviewers identified the unnamed city as their own. In New York, the 'Arcadia' development was seen to mirror Trump Towers, while Toronto readers have compared the Soap Market to their own farmers' market in Kensington. Once again, Crace's extraordinary powers of invention and description are used to great effect, as the old Soap Market, its people, their customs and language are brought to life.

'My books are full of politics and social commentary,' says Crace. 'They are all about our age and our concerns'. I'm an uncompromising, North Korean-style, Old Labour dogmatist. My novels are more ambiguous--though, surely, there's no mistaking the atheistic, libertarian, anti-trade sensibilities which lurk behind them.' His most recent work reveals a turn towards greater tenderness, though gleeful invention and clear-eyed satire are always close at hand. In addition to The gift of stonesand Arcadia, Crace has published a themed cycle of stories, Continent (1986), Signals of distress (1994), Quarantine (1997), which won the Whitbread Novel of the Year, Being dead (1999), which won the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and The devil's larder (2001). His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. In 1999 Jim Crace was elected to the Royal Society of Literature. In March 2000, he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Central England for Distinguished Literary Achievements.