The papers of British writer Jim Crace, author of acclaimed works “Continent” (1986), “Arcadia” (1992), “Quarantine” (1997), “Being Dead” (1999) and “The Pesthouse” (2007), are now open at the Harry Ransom Center. A finding aid of the collection can be accessed online.
The Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, acquired Crace’s archive in 2008. The collection is made up of more than 45 boxes of materials, including the research notes, early drafts and edited page proofs of “All That Follows” (2010), Crace’s novel that is being released on April 20.
The archive contains all of Crace’s manuscripts of his novels, stories, plays and essays. The collection also includes notes and outlines for works, reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work, recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence and a proposal for two novels, “The Finalist” and “Archipelago.”
“Continent,” Crace’s first novel, earned the Whitbread First Novel Award, the David Higham Prize for fiction and the Guardian Fiction Award. Crace has continued to receive prestigious awards for his works. His novel “Being Dead” received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and “Quarantine” was Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
“It is with excitement and delight that the Center serves as a home for my own archive, spanning everything from first childhood attempts at fiction and teenage poems through 17 years of journalism and nine published novels to page drafts of my current ongoing book (partly set in Austin) and watercolour sketches for an upcoming fictional memoir,” said Crace. “It is, of course, strange and even a little distressing to part with so many valued and familiar papers–but I am certain that it is better that they are available and cared for in the Ransom Center than boxed and shut away in the attic of our house in Birmingham, England. No writer could wish for more than to be allocated a corner in such a fine, important and world-class collection.”
Video of Crace reading from “All That Follows” and other related links are available online.
High-resolution press images of Crace and items from his archive are available.
