Howard was born in Manchester in 1942, and graduated from Cambridge University.
He has written an extensive number of novels, starting with Coming From Behind in 1983 then another 3 before The Mighty Walzer – set in the Jewish community in Manchester during the 1950s – won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000.
There have been four TV documentaries about Howard Jacobson – one for BBC 'Arena', two for ITV 'South Bank Show' and an independant documentary. Two of his books also inspired their own television series.
In the last 2 decades there have been another 9 books including The Finkler Question, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and his latest is his memoir Mother’s Boy.