British · 1912–1994
J.L. Carr's "A Month in the Country" was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize, a novella about a shell-shocked veteran restoring a medieval mural in a Yorkshire church. The British author worked as a schoolteacher while producing slim, perfect novels and running a small press. Carr's fiction finds in English rural life material for meditations on time, loss, and the persistence of beauty.