Howard Jacobson Interviewed by Sophie Ratcliffe

Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson looks back to his beginnings as a writer in an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, and of being an insider and an outsider, both English and Jewish.

Jacobson will be 80 this year. His first novel wasn’t published until he was 40. He traces the life that made him into the writer he is today, from a 1940s working class childhood in Manchester to studying at Cambridge under FR Leavis and arriving in Sydney as a maverick young professor. It was an early life that also included spells selling handbags on a market stall and helping to run an Australian-inspired restaurant in Cornwall.

Jacobson is author of 16 novels and five works of non-fiction. He won the 2010 Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. His other works include Coming From Behind, Peeping Tom, The Very Model of a Man, No More Mister Nice Guy, and The Mighty Walzer, set in the Jewish community in Manchester during the 1950s, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. His more recent novels are Zoo Time, Shylock Is My Name, and Pussy.

This event is part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew culture.