Howard Jacobson

A favourite with Book Festival audiences, London based Jacobson read English at Cambridge under F R Leavis before going on to teach at the University of Sydney, Selwyn College, Cambridge and Wolverhampton Polytechnic. His first appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival was in 1993 and since then he has featured in our programme in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010. Phew!

An award-winning novelist and Independent columnist, Howard Jacobson has just recently won the 2010 Man Booker Prize with his terrific novel The Finkler Question (you can buy it through Amazon here – just click the book link below) after being longlisted twice for Kalooki Nights in 2006 and Who's Sorry Now? in 2002. Praise for The Finkler Question has been voluble and widespread: ‘Technically the characterisation is impeccable, the prose a subtle delight, the word selection everywhere perfect, the phrase-making fresh and arresting without self-consciousness. Indeed, there's so much that is first rate in the manner of Jacobson's delivery that I could write all day on his deployment of language’ by Edward Docx in the Observer.

Alex Clark in the Guardian wrote ‘In its insistent interrogation of Jewishness... it is by turns breezily open and thought-provokingly opaque, and consistently wrong-foots the reader’. ‘Sentence by sentence, there are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language’ commented James Walton in the Telegraph.

Howard Jacobson talking about the Finkler question