Howard Jacobson Wins the 2010 Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question
Alert! Howard Jacobson has won the 2010 Man Booker Prize, for his “comic masterpiece” The Finkler Question, it was announced at a gala ceremony at London’s Guildhall, UK, this evening.
And Andrew Motion has just announced that the winner is … HOWARD JACOBSON – congratulations!!
Man Booker Prize
ManBookerPrize
The work was up against five other novels, including Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room; view the complete shortlist here.
From the official press release:
London author and columnist Howard Jacobson has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who’s Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.
The Finkler Question is a novel about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.
Said to have ‘some of the wittiest, most poignant and sharply intelligent comic prose in the English language’, The Finkler Question has been described as ‘wonderful’ and ‘richly satisfying’ and as a novel of ‘full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding’.
Read the first chapter of The Finkler Question:
He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one.
He was a man who saw things coming. Not shadowy premonitions before and after sleep, but real and present dangers in he daylit world. Lamp posts and trees reared up at him, splintering his shins. Speeding cars lost control and rode on to the footpath leaving him lying in a pile of torn tissue and mangled bones. Sharp objects dropped from scaffolding and pierced his skull.
- Complete excerpt at LadiesWhoLunch.co.za (PDF download)
As the winner was not the man we backed – which isn’t to take anything away from Jacobson, and heartiest congratulations to him – Your Correspondent is off to bed! More Man Booker coverage on our Facebook page tomorrow… and look out for an interview with Finkler in this weekend’s Sunday Times.
Book details
- The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
EAN: 9781408809105
Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Image courtesy Man Booker Prize
Apr
