Howard Jacobson wins Man Booker Prize for ‘The Finkler Question’

Author and columnist Howard Jacobson has been honoured with Man Booker Prize for his comic novel ‘The Finkler Question’.

Jacobson, who beat contenders including double winner Peter Carey, received the 50,000 pounds prize at London”s Guildhall.

Chair of judges, Sir Andrew Motion, described the 68-year-old author”s book as “very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle”.

It explores Jewishness through the lives of three friends – two of them Jewish and one who wishes he was.

Accepting the award, Jacobson joked he had been writing unused acceptance speeches for years.

“I note that my language in these speeches grows less gracious with the years,” the BBC quoted him a saying.

“You start to want to blame the judges who have given you the prize for all the prizes they didn”t give you. But they aren”t, of course, the same judges.

“Tonight, I forgive everyone – they were only doing their job those judges, every one of whose names I could reel off,” he added.

Sir Andrew said the “marvellous book” was “all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be”.

“It”s highly articulate, everything works in it very well,” he said.

“That is what you expect from him but it”s also, in an interesting and complicated way, a very sad book, a very melancholy book.”

Jacobson”s 11th novel is about a former BBC radio producer, Julian Treslove, who is attacked on his way home from an evening out reminiscing with friends.

After the attack, his sense of his own identity begins to change.

Jacobson, who describes himself as “the Jewish Jane Austen” has said the book is about “what Jewishness looks like to someone from the outside”.

“I bring the ways of Jewish thinking into the English novel,” he said.

The five-strong judging panel met on Tuesday afternoon and decided the winner in one hour.

But the decision was not unanimous with the judges – Sir Andrew, journalist and broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe, Royal Opera House creative director Deborah Bull, author Frances Wilson and Financial Times literary editor Rosie Blau – voting three to two for The Finkler Question.