Howard Jacobson

Jacobson grew up in Manchester in a working-class Jewish family and read English at Cambridge under F. R. Leavis, whose exacting seriousness about literature stayed with him even as his own fiction turned toward comedy.

He taught English literature at Sydney University in the 1960s (an experience mined for his early novel Redback) and later at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, before becoming a full-time writer and newspaper columnist known for defending comic fiction's literary seriousness, often compared to Philip Roth for his preoccupation with Jewishness, sex, and male anxiety.

The Finkler Question (2010) follows a recently widowed philosopher, his grieving old teacher, and a gentile friend bewildered by his own sudden longing to be Jewish, weaving grief and the era's Israel-Palestine arguments through sustained comedy; it won the Booker Prize, one of the few outright comic novels to do so. He continues to write and comment on Jewish life from London.