Harvest (Crace)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 1, 1946
• Where—St. Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
• Education—B.A., Birminghham City University
• Awards—2 Whitbread Awards; National Book
   Award (US)
• Currently—lives in Birmingham, England


James "Jim" Crace (born ) is a contemporary English writer who has won a number of awards. He currently lives in the Moseley area of Birmingham with his wife. They have two children, Thomas Charles Crace (born 1981) and the actress Lauren Rose Crace, who played Danielle Jones in EastEnders.

Biography
Crace was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and grew up with his siblings in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield, where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London.

After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), working in Sudan. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked with the BBC, writing educational programmes. From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist, before giving up due to the excessive "political interference" he experienced at newspapers such as The Sunday Times.

In 1974 he published his first work of prose fiction, Annie, California Plates in The New Review, and in the next 10 years would write a number of short stories and radio plays.

In 1986 Crace published Continent, which won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Guardian Fiction prize. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999 and has had  two books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including his 11th and most recent, Harvest.  (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/13.)