Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson (born Manchester, 1942) is a British novelist and journalist of Jewish heritage. His comic novels often turn on the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. His name became linked with humour and with Jewish identity, qualities that have invited comparisons with Philip Roth and that culminated in the Man Booker Prize in 2010.

Brought up in Prestwich, on the edge of Manchester, he studied English at Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. After a spell lecturing at the University of Sydney, he returned to Britain and taught at Wolverhampton and Selwyn College, Cambridge. His first novel, Coming From Behind (1983), is a campus comedy drawn from his years at Wolverhampton. Since then he has written fiction, essays and a travel book about Australia, contributed a weekly column to The Independent, and worked in television.

His style is discursive and wry. His books examine relations between men and women and the Jewish experience in Britain across the later twentieth century, and he often creates doubles of himself on the page. The Mighty Walzer (1999), about a teenage table tennis champion in 1950s Manchester, contains, by his own admission, a good deal of autobiography. Kalooki Nights (2006) and The Finkler Question (2010) probe what it means to be Jewish today. The latter was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis in 1986.

Jacobson is a frequent voice in public debate, and his views on Israel and on antisemitism in the Labour Party have drawn both criticism and support. His legacy lies largely in showing that comedy can serve as a serious tool for thinking about British Jewish identity.