Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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Radio 4. My couple of My castaway this week is the writer Howard Jacobson. He is English, Jewish, funny,

provocative and angry, although not necessarily in that order, and perhaps less angry these days.

After many years swiping at literary prizes, last October, he walked off with the biggest one going,

the man-booker.

As a child growing up in post-war Manchester, he knew he wanted to write, but he was nearly 40

before he got on with it.

I was trying to write like Henry James, he says. It took me a long time to realize my material

could be the world that I'd grown up in. So Howard Jacobson it was, I think, the 12th of October,

you were the favorite to win the man-booker prize

with the Fincler question and you had managed to convince yourself that you were not

going to win is that right? Well if I was the favorite is the first I've heard of it. I thought I was the long shot

but anyway I'd certainly decided I was a long shot.

And my mother had told me I was a long shot.

Because she said the book was what too Jewish? she said it was too Jewish but she's also

always been telling me I'm the long shot because she wants to save me from

disappointment she's always been a very protective mother in this way she wants me

to feel that not to hope for too much.

She wasn't with you at the award ceremony but was she watching on television?

She did watch on television though she did say she wasn't going to watch on television.

...