Novelist Matthew Kneale won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year prize last night but only by the slimmest of margins after judges were told they could not call it a tie.
English Passengers, a tale of a 19th-century odyssey to find the Garden of Eden which takes the travellers to Tasmania, won the award and the cheque for £22,500 sterling that goes with it.
The judges had wanted to call it a tie, awarding the prize jointly to Bad Bloodby the late Lorna Sage, but panel chairman Sir Tim Rice used a casting vote to choose an outright victor.
The decision broke the four-year run of poetry volumes that had dominated the Whitbread.
It is success second time around for Kneale (40) after being pipped to the more prestigious Booker Prize by Margaret Atwood last year.
AFP