Fraser Grace
Fraser Grace worked as an actor and performance poet before becoming a playwright.
His best known play to date is Breakfast with Mugabe, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was joint winner of the John Whiting Award for best new play of 2006, and was awarded a Silver Sony Award after broadcast on R3 and The World Service.
His plays are published by Oberon books.
Thanks to Escalator, Fraser is currently completing his first collection of short fiction. Entitled Wrestling Angels, the stories offer a dark, funny and sometimes shocking take on biblical events. Three stories from the collection were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009.
To learn more about Fraser's work in theatre, opera and radio drama, or to read more from Wrestling Angels, go to www.frasergrace.co.uk.
Extract from Once I Was Dead
Once I was dead, now I’m alive.
Not many people have been in my position. Apparently that makes me interesting.
It’s my catchphrase as a matter of fact, my slogan. I was dead for a week; I was ill, I got worse, I rallied, I died. Fifty people signed an affidavit, lodged at the temple: ‘Between dying and burial, he was never alone’.
It was my sisters who washed my body – an intimacy for which I’m glad I wasn’t conscious. Then the Mothers of the Street took over; ointments and spices, pummelled into every crease of my skin, so that what was parchment before I died briefly learned to be taut again, pinging to the touch like a baby’s cheek.
(I still smell that smell, the smell of anointing. It has never left me. When I feel odd in the world, as I often do since my return, I push my face close to the soft white skin on the inside of my arm - the one private part of a man he can reach with his nose - and inhale. They are warm, pungent smells, and strangely, though slowly fading now, they remind me I am a miracle, and blessed.)
After ointments, the ragwork….
*To read the rest of the story, log on to www.frasergrace.co.uk/newfiction.htm.