“It is good for a person who has suffered from acute shyness, as I had, to find that he can cause as much upset as he suffered. Better to be a brute, I thought, than to be a wallflower.”

British novelist and journalist

Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. He is known for comic fiction, especially novels that explore the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He won the Man Booker Prize. His writing blends humour with close attention to identity, culture, and private uncertainty. The comic edge is central to his work, and his novels often return to the pressures and contradictions faced by British Jewish lives.