Mother’s Boy: Howard Jacobson & John Mullan

A memoir by the Booker Prize-winning novelist

The Queens Park Book Festival has adopted Howard and John.  In their third appearance here they will talk about Howard’s recently published memoir Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings.  He describes his journey from working class immigrant origins to winning the Booker Prize and becoming one of Britain’s best-loved authors.  John’s most recent book, The Artful Dickens, was featured at last year’s festival.

‘It’s my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put-together, aspire to make art.  Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were unhappy in it?  And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round.’

“A wonderful memoir, written with great linguistic brio. Candid, shrewd and moving – a classic of its kind.“

William Boyd

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson has written sixteen novels and five works of non-fiction. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question; he was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014 for J.

John Mullan

John Mullan is a professor in the English department at UCL. He wrote the regular ‘Book Club’ column on fiction in the Guardian and frequently appears on the BBC’s Review Show. He was a judge of the ‘Best of the Booker Prize’ in 2008 and a judge of the Man Booker Prize itself in 2009. He has lectured widely in the UK and the US, and makes regular appearances at the UK literary festivals.