A book praised by a critic last year as "too good" to win the £21,000 Booker Prize yesterday won instead the world's richest fiction prize worth £75,000.
Nicola Barker, 34 - who has so far not made large sums from writing - carried off the Irish IMPAC literary award for her novel Wide Open against a formidable field which included Philip Roth and Toni Morrison.
Ms Barker, who lives in Hackney, east London, said: "I'll have to pick myself up off the floor. I always said that winning doesn't matter in literature but now that I've won I think it's great".
She said the first thing she would buy with the prize money was a new pair of running shoes.
The four-year-old IMPAC award is the biggest for a single work of fiction. Funded by the US management consultancy Improved Management Profitability and Control, it is run by Dublin corporation libraries department.
It has not yet acquired the prestige of the Booker or of the Prix Goncourt, which gives only 50 francs (about £5). But it has come to be nicknamed the "honeypot prize" because of the avid worldwide entry it draws.
Ms Barker was up against two other Barkers - Pat and Clive. The Bs alone among her 104 competitors included Nicholson Baker, Julian Barnes, Ronan Bennett, Judy Blume, William Boyd and Anita Brookner.
Among heavyweights lower down the alphabet were Sebastian Faulks, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Harris, Nick Hornby, Milan Kundera, Hanif Kureishi, Penelope Lively, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, William Trevor and Tom Wolfe. The shortlist of seven included Roth's I Married a Communist, Morrison's Paradise, and Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain.
In singling out Wide Open, a a tale of two estranged brothers on the isle of Sheppey, the judges said it focused on marginal lives, the dispossessed and the apparently mad. They praised its "manic energy and taut eloquence worthy of a large, serious and global readership" and its stunning manipulation of language.
"Wide Open is word perfect, witty and ironic. Its dialogue sparkles and its chiselled sentences display both a razor-sharp comic sensibility and flawless structure," they said.
Ms Barker said: "I am greatly influenced by where I live in the Hackney Downs. It's full of life with people always shouting in the street at each other - just like I tend to do."
In an interview earlier this year, Ms Barker said she had been a "morose" teenager after her parents emigrated to South Africa when she was nine and split up there. She returned to Britain with her mother when she was 15. "Cambridge [university] was a disaster for me. People were very cruel.
"There's this huge sterotype in fiction about what a normal person is. I often feel as if writers are trying to write about normal people, or a concept of normality, so that everyone will be comforted. Well, I'm not interested in comforting people."
She also indicated that her publishers, Faber and Faber, may be disappointed if they hope to capitalise on the prize by getting her to give literary readings.
