Booker winner Howard Jacobson's Oz influence

ENGLISH comic novelist Howard Jacobson acknowledged the "huge influence" of Australia after he won the Booker Prize yesterday.

ENGLISH comic novelist Howard Jacobson acknowledged the "huge influence" of Australia after he won the Booker Prize yesterday.

Australia had influenced his writing and humour, he said. 

Jacobson, who won the pound stg. 50,000 ($81,486) award for his novel about British Jewishness, The Finkler Question, was a "boy lecturer with shoulder-length hair" at the University of Sydney's English department in the mid-60s. A decade later he wrote a book about his experiences, In The Land of Oz.

The Finkler Question, written off by bookmakers but compared to Shakespeare by the Booker judges, is dedicated to three of Jacobson's friends who died last year, including the Melbourne Marxist scholar Terry Collits.

Jacobson's surprise win denied Australia's Peter Carey, shortlisted for Parrot and Olivier in America, the chance to become the first three-time Booker winner. It also left punters out of pocket, following a betting plunge on Tom McCarthy that saw his novel C start an odds-on favourite.

Jacobson's win is the biggest Booker upset since Australia's DBC Pierre won in 2003 for another comic novel, Vernon God Little. At 68, he is the oldest Booker winner since the 69-year-old William Golding won for Rites of Passage three decades ago. While twice longlisted, he had never before made the shortlist.

"I have been waiting for this for a long time . . . I was starting to look like the novelist that never ever won the Booker Prize," Jacobson said.

Though he returned to England in 1970, the Manchester-born Jacobson was a frequent visitor to Australia, describing himself as a "besotted outsider".

"What I loved about Australia . . . and one of the reasons I kept going back", he wrote in 2005, "was the bear-pit atmosphere of the place, the way every relationship you formed, however fleeting, resembled a war".

Allen & Unwin, which publishes The Finkler Question in Australia, said the win was especially pleasing because of Jacobson's "strong Australian connections".

The chairman of the judging panel, former British poet laureate Andrew Motion, said Jacobson "certainly knows something that Shakespeare knew: that . . . comedy and tragedy are intimately linked."

"It is a book about Jewishness. But it is so much more than that. It is a book about male friendship -- and how we don't always like our friends. It's very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle."