Professor Dan Jacobson was born in 1929 in Johannesburg of a Lithuanian mother and a Latvian father. He attended Kimberley Boys' High School and the University of the Witwatersrand. He has worked on a kibbutz in Israel, as a teacher in London, as a journalist in Johannesburg and, after returning to Kimberley, in the family milling business. He moved to England in 1958 where he first taught in a Jewish school, and later became Professor of English literature at University College, a post he had held for 10 years.
After the publication of his first two novels, The Trap (1955) and A Dance in the Sun (1956), he was awarded a one-year Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. A Long Way from London, a collection of short stories published in 1958, won the Mail on Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and his collection Time of Arrival and Other Essays (1963) won a Somerset Maugham Award. His volume of autobiography, Time and Time Again: Autobiographies (1985), won the J. R. Ackerley Prize. His most recent book is All For Love made it to the Man Booker Prize long list. All for love is the story of the stormy relationship between Princess Louise, daughter of Leopold II of Belgium, and her extra-marital lover Lt. Géza Mattachich.
