THE CAPITAL ACCORDING TO... Howard Jacobson

Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson talks to Harry McKinley about life in Soho and London's best bagel

- Harry McKinley

You're from Manchester and that background is often talked about as an important part of your own 'storyline'. What brought you to London?

We were taught by our teachers that you had to get away from home, so I left and went to Cambridge, then Australia and various other places. But London was always the goal because there was a sense that if you were ever going to do whatever it was you wanted to do, it had to be there. I finally got my first novel published at 40 and it was then that I thought, it's time to live in London, so I bought a little flat with my then wife in Clapham Old Town.

Where do you live now?

Lots of my moving around has to do with failed marriages and the like. I live now with my third and final wife in Soho in a glass mezzanine penthouse. It's flooded with light, my books are everywhere and I can look out over the city. I've lived here for 20 years and, in my old age, I finally got what I wanted. Everything is walkable, so I live a wonderfully pedestrian existence.

Do you have a favoured neighbourhood haunt?