Howard Jacobson's novel about sorrow lifts Booker prize

The writer and columnist has been longlisted twice for the prize, in 2006 for Kalooki Nights and in 2002 for Who's Sorry Now, but has never before been shortlisted.

His winning book, The Finkler Question, is a story about love, loss and male friendship, and explores what it means to be Jewish today.

Critics have praised the book as "wonderful" and "richly satisfying" and as a novel of "full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding".

Chairman of the judges and former poet laureate Andrew Motion said: "The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle.

"It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize. You expect a book by Howard Jacobson to be very clever and very cunning and it is both of those things. It's highly articulate, everything works in it very well."

The book tells the tale of two old schoolfriends and their teacher was funny but "so nearly adjacent to tragedy".

Jacobson, 58, was born in Manchester and educated at Cambridge University before spells teaching in Wolverhampton and Sydney, Australia.

Jacobson said the book was about "sorrow".

He added: "I think I'm talking about loss," he explained. "I wanted to make the reader laugh and weep at the same moment."

Each of the six shortlisted authors receives 2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.