James Crace FRSL (born 1 March 1946) is an English novelist, playwright and short story writer.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999, Crace was born in Hertfordshire and has lectured at the University of Texas at Austin.

1946 was Crace's year of birth, which happened at the neo-classical Hertfordshire country house of Brocket Hall, while it served as a maternity hospital.

[2] In 2013, Crace said his father was "a curmudgeonly leftwing atheist who... was open-hearted in the big things and narrow and doctrinaire in every other respect".

[3] But he also spoke of his love his father at the same time, describing him as a man who liked such activities as birding, walking, gardening, reading and tennis, with Crace admitting that he had "totally turned into him" as he had aged.

[3] An edition of Roget's Thesaurus that his father gave him as a Christmas present when he was 11 Crace retained as a "constant companion, my best possession", throughout his life.

[3] Of Birmingham, he described living there as "politically important to be in a place where the future is being mapped out, rather than the past being replayed, which is what happens if you go to a Cotswolds village".

[3] A scientific atheist and modern Darwinist,[2] he is a former member of the British Labour Party, but left in a dispute over its stance on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[3] Crace has expressed his admiration for Günter Grass, Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, adding "Less so Kundera, more so the Latin American magical realists".

[7] In 1974 Crace 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, including: Helter Skelter, Hang Sorrow, Care'll Kill a Cat, The New Review (December 1975), reprinted in Cosmopolitan and included in Introduction 6: Stories by new writers, Faber and Faber (1977); Refugees, winner of the Socialist Challenge short story competition (judges: John Fowles, Fay Weldon, Terry Eagleton), Socialist Challenge (1977); Seven Ages; Quarto (June 1980), broadcast as Middling by BBC Radio 3.

[4] Receiving a request to review a book by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and, not admiring it because he believed he could do just as well or fancying himself capable of doing even better, Crace set out to write what would become his first novel.

[3] He based an amputation scene in that book on his father's experience with osteomyelitis—"his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder.

It features a character called Victor, owner of a fruit and vegetable market in an unnamed city that resembles Covent Garden in London, and who has just reached his eightieth birthday.

[12] Six, which Crace admits is one of his least successful books, was published in 2003, flawed by his inability to concentrate wholly on it as his mother slowly died from dementia and cancer and the effort extracted by his being her primary carer.

An elderly widower, curious as to what is rattling his bins at night, ventures out to investigate and is leapt upon and bitten by a creature he senses is different from the dogs or deer to which he is accustomed.

"[2] In response to the assertion by critic Adam Mars-Jones that to read a passage from a Crace book is to invite a migraine, he described it as "very funny...