Streetwalking with Howard Jacobson

I am a novelist, an essayist, a columnist, a lecturer, a speaker, a broadcaster, a one-time tv critic, a long-time art critic, a sometime restaurant critic, and an Honorary Australian of the Year. I wrote my first novel when I was forty, so that makes me a late-starter as well. That novel was called Coming From Behind which tells you something about the way my protagonists feel about themselves. Failure is, for me, the most delicious and rewarding of subjects. Failure is the stuff of comedy, which might be why I have twice won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing. Since that is the only prize that recognizes books that make readers laugh and to date no one else has won it twice, I wonder if that entitles me to think of myself as the best comic writer in Britain. That isn’t boasting. I don’t like being called a comic writer. In 2010 I won the Booker Prize for The Finkler Question which would have elevated my reputation as a serious and even tragic novelist had The Finkler Question not been described as the first comic novel to win The Booker Prize. Source