Howard Jacobson wins comic fiction prize

Cheering news: Howard Jacobson wins prize for comic fiction

Howard Jacobson wins this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for his novel Zoo Time.

By Jon Stock

Howard Jacobson has been named the winner of this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for his novel, Zoo Time. It is the second occasion he has triumphed, having won the prize in 2000, the first year of the award.

Jacobson fought off stiff competition from Michael Frayn, Deborah Moggach and Helen DeWitt. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Marina Lewycka, DBC Pierre and, most recently, Terry Pratchett.

Zoo Time tells the tale of Guy Ableman, a writer struggling with his affections for his wife and mother-in-law, and the terminal state of literature. Reviewing the book for the Telegraph, Alexei Sayle described it as “seriously funny”.

Jacobson will be presented with a suitably Wodehousian prize, a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig, which will be named ‘Zoo Time’. It will join other pigs named after books that have won the prize, including ‘A Short History of Tractors in the Ukranian’ (Marina Lewycka) and ‘Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye’ (Christopher Brookmyre).

Click here to read the rest of this story

Howard Jacobson: ‘I write fiction. The others write crap’

The Booker winner on his new, ‘funniest-ever’ book, his scorn for genre fiction and why he’ll never wear a T-shirt.

By Elizabeth Day

Your new novel, Zoo Time, features a publisher who has committed suicide, an agent in hiding and a novelist harangued by book groups. Is publishing doomed?

It’s not my experience that my publisher shot himself or my agent is always hiding from me but I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t think there was something worrying about, not so much publishing, but the state of the book… some of the things that I play with, some of the jokes I make, attack things that need to be attacked.

You write acerbically about genre fiction…

I’m contemptuous of genre things… You go into a good bookshop like Foyles and see a kind of “vampire room”. I was sitting in the American Embassy a while back, trying to get a visa, and every woman in the room was reading the vampire series – you know, the one with the black cover and the bit of blood. Now people are reading soft porn! What happened to the fun of reading a good book? There are people who, when they say they prefer Henry James to Fifty Shades of Grey, they do actually mean that.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Howard Jacobson attacks the dearth of ‘good readers’

Howard Jacobson, Man Booker prize-winning novelist, before his talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The Man Booker prize-winning author warns that political correctness is killing the way we read.

By Charlotte Higgins

The novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. But, he said, the fault lies not with novelists, but with the lack of good readers.

Describing his experience of appearing at reading groups – “sometimes they are lovely, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes they are just staggeringly rude” – Jacobson said that he felt a sense of “heartbreak” when he heard readers say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”

He added: “The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read.

“That’s like the end of civilisation. That is the end. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Room leads longlist for Impac Dublin award

Emma Donoghue. Photograph: Andrew Bainbridge

Emma Donoghue’s novel receives most nominations in 147-strong field for €100,000 prize

By Alison Flood

Emma Donoghue’s disturbing tale of an imprisoned boy, Room, is at the forefront of the 147 titles competing for one of the world’s most lucrative literary prizes, the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin literary award.

With novels nominated by libraries around the world, this year’s award pits some of the biggest names in international fiction against each other, from the UK’s Howard Jacobson, picked for his Booker-winning novel The Finkler Question, to American novelist Jennifer Egan and her Pulitzer-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad and Israeli author David Grossman’s To the End of the Land.

Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende, Germany’s Bernhard Schlink and Norway’s Per Petterson are also competing for this year’s Impac, with a host of different genres also represented on the longlist, from South African author Lauren Beukes’s Arthur C Clarke award-winning science fiction novel Zoo City to Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult novel Mocking Jay, Justin Cronin’s vampire blockbuster The Passage and Irish author Tana French’s thriller Faithful Place.

…read more

David Robson looks back at 2010

David Robson looks back at 2010, a year in which comic fiction sparkled but dark plots proliferated, and in which politicians turned to the page and minutiae became big.

For Howard Jacobson fans, a small but passionate sect, 2010 was a year when sour bewilderment turned to sweet wonderment. How could such an outstanding novelist be made to wait until he was nearly 70 before featuring on the Man Booker shortlist? And how, having finally made the shortlist, could he so effortlessly leapfrog the competition to claim the prize itself?…read more 

                         Expand your bookshelf