Howard Jacobson wins Booker, bookies celebrate

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London author and newspaper columnist Howard Jacobson defeated the bookie predictions and won the £50,000-Booker Prize for Fiction for his latest novel The Finkler Question on Tuesday night.
Sixty-eight-year-old novelist and critic Jacobson, who has famously described himself as “a Jewish Jane Austen,” was longlisted twice earlier for the Booker Prize — for Kalooki Nights in 2006 and for Who’s Sorry Now? in 2002. He has never been shortlisted for Booker before this.
Jacobson’s victory swept aside compatriot Tom McCarthy’s novel C, which was a favourite of the British bookies to win the prize. Even Australian writer Peter Carey lost his chance of making Booker history after his latest novel, Parrot and Oliver in America, lost to The Finkler Question.
Last year, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize. It was the first ever odds-on winner and the heaviest backed Booker book ever till this year.
This year, McCarthy’s C was the hottest-ever favourite for the Booker Prize with odds of 8/15, but The Finkler Question’s odds improved from 12/1 to 6/1 with William Hill on Tuesday morning.
However, McCarthy’s C could not emulate Wolf Hall’s success and helped the bookmakers, who were expecting to lose a huge amount of money in payout in case C won.
“There was a massive gamble on C which saw the book starting at even shorter odds than 2009 winner Wolf Hall, but we were saved from a second successive six-figure drubbing by the unexpected win for Howard Jacobson,” William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said on Tuesday night after the winner was announced at a Guildhall ceremony in London.
Last year, William Hill had lost a monster six-figure sum, more than £100,000, after Wolf Hall was picked as the best book by the Booker jury.
The frenzy of betting for McCarthy made bookmaker Ladbrokes nervous and last week it suspended market on the winner of the Booker Prize. Manchester-born Jacobson’s book, which is about love, loss, male friendship and Jewish identity, was chosen from 138 entries, including 14 called in by the judges.
Jacobson, who studied English at Cambridge University under influential literary critic F.R. Leavis, has taught at the University of Sydney, Selwyn College, Cambridge and Wolverhampton Polytechnic.
Accepting the prize, Jacobson joked that he was not used to writing acceptance speeches. “I am speechless. Fortunately I prepared one earlier. It is dated 1983. That’s how long the wait’s been.”
“I see here there is another that was altered in 2004, then 2002 which I appear to have amended only slightly for 2004, 2006 and 2008. I note that my language in these speeches grows less gracious with the years. You start to want to blame the judges who have given you the prize for all the prizes they didn’t give you. But they aren’t, of course, the same judges. Tonight, I forgive everyone — they were only doing their job those judges, every one of whose names I could reel off,” he said.