Howard Jacobson

Born in Manchester, England in 1942, Howard Jacobson is an award-winning novelist and broadcaster educated at Cambridge University. He lectured at the University of Sydney for three years before returning to England where he taught English at Selwyn College. His novel, The Mighty Walzer (1999), set in the Jewish community in Manchester during the 1950s, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000. Howard’s recent novels include The Finkler Question (2010), winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction; Zoo Time (2012); J (2014); Shylock Is My Name (2016); and Pussy (2017). His two nonfiction books, Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993), an exploration of his own Jewish roots, and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997), an analysis of comedy and its functions, inspired related television series.