British Library · CC BY 3.0

A British novelist whose comic fiction returns repeatedly to the dilemmas of British Jewish life, Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question, a novel about Englishmen contending, awkwardly and often absurdly, with what it means to be or not be Jewish. His fiction and journalism have made him one of the most prominent voices writing Jewish identity into contemporary British literature.