Grossman wins Man Booker

LEADING ISRAELI novelist David Grossman has won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his latest novel, A Horse Walks Into a Bar.

The £50,000 prize is shared with the book’s English translator, Jessica Cohen, and both receive an extra £1,000 for being shortlisted.

A second Israeli writer, Amos Oz, was among the authors nominated for the prize, for his novel, Judas.

Mr Grossman and Ms Cohen received their awards at a ceremony at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on Wednesday night.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a blistering narrative describing a performance by a stand-up comedian in a one-night stand in Netanya in which he draws out, with a mixture of aggression and self-pity, long-suppressed emotional pain derived from a childhood when he was bullied both in and outside his home.

In his review of the novel for the JC, critic Stoddard Martin wrote: “On every page, we encounter an implied invitation to set the book down, but the performer’s struggle to muffle and at the same time release the howls from his soul is too profoundly haunting.”

Mr Grossman has previously won the Wingate Prize for his epic 2010 novel, To the End of the Land, and many other international awards including the Frankfurt Peace Prize and the French Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has published fiction and non-fiction, as well as children’s literature, and is known also for his trenchant journalism. His work has been translated into 36 languages.

Ms Cohen has translated a number of Israeli authors including Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan and Tom Segev.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar is published