Leading Israeli novelist David Grossman has won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his latest novel, A Horse Walks Into a Bar, published by Jonathan Cape. The £50,000 prize is shared with the book’s English translator, Jessica Cohen, and both receive an extra £1,000 for being shortlisted. Mr Grossman’s fellow Israeli writer Amos Oz was among the other authors shortlisted for the prize, for his novel, Judas.

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 out of 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, as well as 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. 

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

Mr Grossman and Ms Cohen were given their awards at a ceremony at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.