AK Blakemore has won the Desmond Elliott prize for best debut, with her historical novel about the English witch trials of the 17th century, The Manningtree Witches, praised by judges as a “stunning achievement”.

Following the story of Rebecca West, who is husbandless, fatherless and barely tolerated by the villagers of Manningtree, Essex, the novel depicts the fallout as pious newcomer Matthew Hopkins begins to ask after the women on the margins of society. It is Blakemore’s first novel, although the author has previously published two collections of poetry.

“My dad lives in Manningtree so it was an area I knew quite well. The process of the writing began when I was in a fallow period of writing poetry. I was messing around with prose, just to have something to write, and the story just really sort of jumped out at me,” Blakemore said.

“I didn’t really have the intention of writing and completing a novel, it started as play. But coming at it from poetry, I had a decent sense in writing of aesthetics and a cinematic, graphic way of composing scenes in my mind. And something about having a story from history that already had a beginning, middle and end, was quite liberating in that sense.”

The Manningtree Witches beat shortlisted novels including little scratch by Rebecca Watson and The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams to take the £10,000 award, which is run by the National Centre for Writing.

Previous winner Lisa McInerney, who was one of this year’s judges, said that Blakemore “takes limited historical detail and, with what seems like effortless grace and imagination, crafts a breathing, complex world full of wrenchingly human characters, and tells us their stories in language that bears endless rereading, so clever and unexpected and pleasurable it is”.

The author said she was “really, really thrilled” to win. “And honoured – the shortlist was just full of amazing books.”