Lesbian writer Ali Smith has won the Whitbread Book Award for her novel, The Accidental, beating off Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby to the top literary prize.
Smith, who missed out on the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, triumphed with her first full-length story in the Novel Award category.
“I still can’t quite believe it. I’ve been very lucky,” said Smith who gave up her job as a lecturer to concentrate on writing after becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome.
The Accidental follows a 12-year-old girl spending the summer in a holiday home with her family in Norfolk. It’s a substandard house in a substandard town and she knows for sure nothing’s going to happen there all substandard summer. So she starts filming the dawn breaking each morning on her Sony digital camera.
Essentially a modern-day reworking of Pasolini's 1968 film Theorem, this remarkable novel is at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark.
"From the outset, The Accidental stood out as a glorious work of fiction that inspired both laughter and sadness and that none of us could stop reading," the Whitbread judges said.
“This extraordinary novel of family life combined humour, sadness and mystery with a wonderful linguistic playfulness and invention.”
The Whitbread Book Awards were created in 1971 in order to celebrate the most enjoyable books of the year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. Since then, it has successfully developed into one of the foremost and most prestigious literary awards in the UK today.
“The Whitbread Book Awards have been, and are, unique in highlighting some of the best examples of British writing as well as some of the most enjoyable reads,” said Alan Parker, Chief Executive of Whitbread Group PLC.
“This year’s winners are, as always, no exception to the rule.”
The five Whitbread Book Award winners, each of whom will receive £5,000, were selected from 476 entries, the highest total ever received in one year. The five books are now eligible for the ultimate prize - the 2005 Whitbread Book of the Year.
The winner will be announced at The Brewery in central London on Tuesday 24 January 2006.
Read our review of The Accidental, Smith's previous book, Hotel World and our interview with Ali Smith.
The Accidental, by Ali Smith
Published by: Hamish Hamilton
ISBN: 0241141907
Price: £12.99
Get The Accidental online and judge the book for yourself. Buy it online and save money to put towards Hotel World.