Winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize Howard Jacobson said he had waited a “long time” for such an accolade as he picked up the award.

The author was a 10/1 outsider with some bookmakers for his comic novel The Finkler Question before the outcome of the contest was announced in a ceremony at London’s Guildhall, earning him a £50,000 prize.

The Manchester-born writer and columnist, who has written 15 novels, said: “I have waited a long time. I don’t think I have any right to suppose that I should have won the Booker Prize but I was wanting to win the Booker Prize from the start.

“I’m not alone in that. All writers feel that it’s such a fantastic prize to win.”

The book tells the tale of two old schoolfriends and their teacher and deals with subjects including love, loss, male friendship and what it means to be Jewish.

Mr Jacobson, who admitted it was beginning to look like he would never win, said he was sick of being described as “under-rated”, adding: “It is beyond belief for me because I was so accustomed to being somebody that was, to begin with, not liked by the Booker Prize.”

He joked: “The shortlist felt like an embrace, I never expected the affair to be consummated.”

The 58-year-old can now expect a huge increase in sales and recognition around the world. Last year’s winner, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, sold half-a-million copies in the UK alone.

He was educated at Cambridge University before spells teaching in Wolverhampton and Sydney, Australia.

Discussing his own lengthy career, he said: “I think I’ve got better and I’ve deepened. I never felt I could go near anything truly tragic because I didn’t feel anything truly tragic had happened to me.

“I needed my father to die. He sort of knew that, he sort of said when he was ill, ‘I’m giving you something now’.”

He described the novel as the saddest he had written and said it had been affected by the deaths of several close friends.

He said: “These things get to you. What I wanted to do though is to feel that I can go on writing an entertaining novel even though the light deepens and darkens and this does become a very dark novel.

“It is a much darker novel than I thought I was writing.”

He joked that the novel he was currently writing, about a novelist who failed to enjoy literary success, would need a “rewrite”.

Exploring love, sex and Jewishness

It was his time teaching English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic that inspired Mr Jacobson’s first novel but it is themes of love, sex and Jewishness that have been the over-riding concerns of his work.

The son of a Manchester market trader, Mr Jacobson rose above his humble roots in the suburb of Prestwich when he went to grammar school and on to university at Cambridge.

He then embarked on a career as an academic, before finding a new life as a novelist, critic and columnist. He has also worked in television and for several years appeared on The Late Show discussing the Booker Prize, but it was only this year that he was finally shortlisted.

Mr Jacobson, who revisited the Jewish Manchester of his youth in his 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, said he was a “shy child” who became a writer “because I was afraid of the world and wanted to remake it”.

The novelist, who describes himself as having “a Jewish mind”, has written 15 novels and is also the author of non-fiction books including Roots Schmoots: Journeys among Jews, an exploration of his own Jewish roots, and Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime, an analysis of comedy and its function.