Howard Jacobson (born 1942) is a British author and journalist. He is best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.
Jacobson was born in 1942 in Manchester. He was brought up in Prestwich and was educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, before going on to study English at Downing College, Cambridge, under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching assignments included a stint at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the 1970s.
Although he has described himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen," (in response to being described as "the English Phillip Roth") he also states, "I'm not by any means conventionally Jewish. I don't go to shul. What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence. I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past. I don't know what kind of trouble this gets somebody into, a disputatious mind. What a Jew is has been made by the experience of 5,000 years, that's what shapes the Jewish sense of humour, that's what shaped Jewish pugnacity or tenaciousness." He maintains that "comedy is a very important part of what I do."
His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic which plans to merge facilities with a local football club. The episode of teaching in a football stadium in the novel is, according to Jacobson in a 1985 BBC interview, the only portion of the novel which is based on a true incident. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.
His fiction, particularly in the five novels he has published since 1998, is characterised chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. Recurring subjects in his work include male—female relations and the Jewish experience in Britain in the mid- to late-20th century. He has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for their habit of creating doppelgängers of themselves in their fiction. Jacobson has been called "the English Philip Roth", although he calls himself the "British Jane Austen.
His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a teen ping pong fan, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography to it. His 2002 novel Who's Sorry Now? — the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London — and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere."
As well as his fiction, he also writes a weekly column for The Independent newspaper as an op-ed writer. In recent times, he has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a "liberal Zionist".
On October 2010, at the age of 68, Jacobson won the prestigious 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to take home said prize. The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about "love, loss and male friendship". Chair of the judges, Andrew Motion said "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize." Jacobson was the oldest winner -- at age 68 -- since William Golding's win in 1980 and The Finkler Question was the first comic novel to take top honors in the 42-year history of the Man Booker prize.
He has also worked as a broadcaster. Two recent television programmes include Channel 4's Howard Jacobson Takes on the Turner, in 2000, and The South Bank Show in 2002 featured an edition entitled "Why the Novel Matters". An earlier profile went out in the series in 1999 and a television documentary entitled "My Son the Novelist" preceded it as part of the Arena series in 1985. His two non-fiction books Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993), and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997), were both bought and turned into television series.
In 2010, Jacobson presented the first part called Creation in the Channel 4 series The Bible: A History.
