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This is Rebecca Loew or Rebecca Loewa if you listen to Suboptimal Radio and you are listening to Men in Blazers on the NBC Sports Network.

Welcome to Men in Blazers pod special. Our guest today, one of England's truly great modern writers is

the 2010 novel The Finkler Question, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction. For those of you saying, what is the Man Booker Prize?

It's like the PFA Player of the Year award, but for words.

Is new novel, Shyluck is my name, out now, on Amazon and in all good bookstores. We welcome to the pod, the one and only, one of my childhood heroes.

Mr Howard Jacobson.

It's lovely to be here, but I'm not sure about this childhood hero business.

Howard, every article I've ever read about you, it calls you one of two things. Either Howard Jacobson, the English Philip Roth.

Or Howard Jacobson, the Jewish Jane Austen. Which do you prefer?

I call myself the Jewish Jane Austen because I've got sick of being called the English Philip Roth.

I once heard you explain Roth. You said he's not an influence.

You asked why and you said I didn't read Roth until I started writing and someone said you like Philip Roth.

And I thought, well, who's he? Didn't he write a dirty book about wanking?

That's not quite the way I would have put it, Roger. I would have put it in a rather more refined way than that. But you're quite right, I didn't know who he was properly until someone said this guy writes like Philip Roth.

So I thought I'd look at Philip Roth. I thought this Philip Roth is fantastic. People say I write like Philip Roth. That is a great compliment. And I take it as a great compliment.

You were born 1942. Second World War German bombs dropping on the north of England. You grew up in post-war Manchester.

How did you describe Manchester to our listeners? I mean, they know it through, you know he didn't sit. They imagine it to be a magical Disneyland filled with Ryan Giggs's, yeah, yeah, Tories, Oasis. What's it really like?

It's better than that. It's the greatest city in the country. It's not the biggest city in the country. It's second to London and maybe even Birmingham.

But it's got the most life and vitality in the country. People are sardonic in Manchester. There's no sky, you see. There's just dark all the time and rain all the time. That's what people say about that. But it's true, which is why it became a great cotton center.

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