Interview with Jim Crace

An extract of Jim Crace’s novel, All That Follows, appeared in our latest issue, Granta 109. The novel will be published in April – by Picador in the UK and Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in the USA. It will also be published in Italy by Guanda, and by Aleph in Spain. You can buy a copy of Granta 109 here.

Click inside the window to watch this interview with Ellah Allfrey, in which Jim Crace discusses the novel, and his method of writing more generally. He reveals that rather than beginning with a setting or character, he starts with an idea, or a question he wants answered: ‘I just wade in and see what happens.’ In All That Follows, this idea was ‘political timidity’ and the question was whether ‘timid bourgeois liberalism’ is preferable to violent political action.

He also explains why he will only be writing one more book, a novel about consciousness, which will be his ‘most ecstatic, most poetic yet’.

Click here to see a full list of our exclusive interviews, with writers including Peter Carey, Daniel Alarcón and Paul Auster, and the musician Natalie Merchant.