Howard Jacobson

Born in Manchester, England in 1942, novelist and broadcaster Howard Jacobson was educated at Cambridge University. He lectured at the University of Sydney for three years before returning to England where he taught English at Selwyn College.

During the 1970s he taught English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the West Midlands, an experience which provided the material for his first novel, Coming From Behind (1983). Subsequent novels include Peeping Tom (1984), a comedy of sexual jealousy satirising literary biography; The Very Model of a Man (1992), a re-working of the Cain and Abel myth; No More Mister Nice Guy (1998), the story of television critic Frank Ritz's mid-life crisis; and The Mighty Walzer (1999), 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 in 2000. In Who's Sorry Now (2002) Jacobson effortlessly charts the comedies and tragedies of the sexual battlefield through protagonist Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London: a man who loves four women and is in love with five more. The Making of Henry (2004), is a tender, comic story of love, hope and disappointment.

An 'Arena' television documentary on Howard Jacobson, entitled 'My Son th