Howard Eric Jacobson was born on 25 August 1942 and is a British novelist and journalist.
22 Facts About Howard Jacobson
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Howard Jacobson is known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.
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Howard Jacobson lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to Britain to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge.
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Howard Jacobson taught at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1974 to 1980.
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Howard Jacobson wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.
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Howard Jacobson has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for his habit of creating doppelgangers of himself in his fiction.
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Howard Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as "the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere".
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In October 2010 Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986.
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Howard Jacobson has argued that an education in science and technology is more conducive to terrorism than an education in the arts and social sciences.
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Jacobson has scripted television programmes including Channel 4's Howard Jacobson Takes on the Turner, in 2000, and The South Bank Show in 2002, which featured an edition entitled "Why the Novel Matters".
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Howard Jacobson presented "Jesus The Jew", episode one of Christianity, A History, on the UK's Channel 4 in January 2009 and in 2010 he presented "Creation", the first part of the Channel 4 series The Bible: A History.
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On 3 November 2010, Howard Jacobson appeared in an Intelligence Squared debate in favour of the motion.
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In February 2011 Howard Jacobson appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
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Howard Jacobson's favourite was "You're a Sweetheart" by Al Bowlly with Lew Stone and Howard Jacobson's Band.
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Howard Jacobson wrote and presented the Australian biographical series Brilliant Creatures on four famous expatriate iconoclasts.
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Howard Jacobson returned to Australia when Conrad was 3 years old.
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Howard Jacobson married his second wife, Rosalin Sadler, in 1978; they divorced in 2004.
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In 2005, Howard Jacobson was married for the third time, to radio and TV documentary maker Jenny De Yong.
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In November 2017, Howard Jacobson joined Simon Sebag Montefiore and Simon Schama in writing a letter to The Times about their concern over antisemitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, with particular reference to a growth in Anti-Zionism and its "antisemitic characteristics".
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Schama and Sebag Montefiore have both written historical works about Israel, while Howard Jacobson has written regularly about Israel and the UK Jewish community in his newspaper columns.
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In September 2018, Howard Jacobson took part in the Intelligence Squared debate on the motion "Jeremy Corbyn is Unfit to be Prime Minister".
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Howard Jacobson made a further criticism of the party in July 2019, when he joined other leading Jewish figures in saying, in a letter to The Guardian, that the investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission into the party in relation to antisemitism allegations was "a taint of international and historic shame" and that trust between the party and most British Jews was "fractured beyond repair".