The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which carries a purse of fifty thousand pounds (approximately $79,200), was announced last night at a ceremony in London. Coming from behind his shortlisted counterparts, at least in terms of where betters placed his book, London author Howard Jacobson took the award for his "comic novel" The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury), which was released today in the United States.
The prize, which Salon's Laura Miller calls "the best literary award," typically promotes a worldwide rise in sales. Last year's winner, Hilary Mantel, has seen rights to her winning book, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), sold in thirty-seven countries, and its sales climb to over a half a million copies in the United Kingdom alone.
This is the first Booker for Jacobson, who was longlisted for the prize twice before in 2006 for Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape) and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now (Jonathan Cape). His novel The Mighty Walzer (Jonathan Cape) won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing in 2000.
This year's judging panel includes former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion, Financial Times literary editor Rosie Blau, Royal Opera House creative director Deborah Bull, journalist Tom Sutcliffe, and critic Frances Wilson.
In the video below, Jacobson and a group of reviewers discuss his winning book, which the author has described as his darkest.