A previously out-of-print memoir from a first-time author has won the Stella prize for the best book by a female Australian writer.

Set in the harsh cold of rural Canada, Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s The Erratics is a dark, autobiographical story about her journey home to take care of her estranged mother.

The judging panel said it was a “gripping” and “honest” portrayal of family dysfunction and physical and mental illness.

The now-prize winning book had been out of print because her small independent publishing house folded only six months after it was released.

After being longlisted for the Stella prize this year, she was signed by an agent and her book snapped up by HarperCollins for immediate reissue.

Laveau-Harvie told Guardian Australia it was “a dream” to even be shortlisted for the Stella prize, because of its role in promoting female writers.

“If there would be one thing I wanted to be shortlisted for, it would have been the Stella,” she told Guardian Australia in March. “If I win, I will be unconscious on the floor.”

Laveau-Harvie was awarded the prize, which has $50,000 in prize money, on Tuesday at an awards ceremony in Melbourne.

The judging committee said her memoir explored the psychological damage that family members could inflict on each other.

“Laveau-Harvie’s narrative voice is detached, slightly numb and darkly humorous,” it said. “[Her] understated dialogue is naturalistic, conveying the deep alienation that can exist in a fractured immediate family.

“The narrative is brimming with honesty, the narrator somehow manages to see all viewpoints, and we are rewarded with an evocative and expansive view.”

Laveau-Harvie described the award as a “beacon and a force for good” and said she would use the prize money to travel.

“I’m going to use this gift to travel to places no one has ever heard of – places like Neche, North Dakota, in the US – to find the traces of a hidden part of my heritage,” she said. “This prize gives me the means to do that.”

Born in Canada, Laveau-Harvie lived in France before moving to Australia in 1988, where she taught at Macquarie University. After retiring, she taught primary schools ethics classes.

The 2019 prize was judged by publisher Louise Swinn, former bookseller Amelia Lush, Miles Franklin award-winning writer Michelle de Kretser, ABC Radio National broadcaster Daniel Browning and journalist Kate McClymont.

Other books shortlisted for the prize were Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau, Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin, Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko, The Bridge by Enza Gandolfo, and Little Gods by Jenny Ackland.

Open to both fiction and non-fiction, the Stella prize was first awarded in 2013.