Barker's tale of eccentrics wins richest fiction prize

A young writer from Hackney in east London has triumphed over a shortlist that featured novels by Philip Roth and the Nobel prize-winner Toni Morrison to take the world's most lavish prize for a single work of fiction.

Nicola Barker, 34, was named yesterday as winner of the Dublin-based International Impac Literary Award, worth Ir£100,000 (about £75,000).

The panel of judges, which included the writers Colm Toíbín and David Dabydeen as well as Suzi Feay, literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, praised Barker's third novel, Wide Open, for its "razor-sharp comic sensibility and flawless structure".

Published by Faber & Faber, Wide Open is set largely on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. It combines Nicola Barker's trademark qualities of offbeat comedy and quirky characterisation with an emotional darkness and depth that marked it, for many critics, as her breakthrough work - even though the author considers it untypical and called it "a hard and boring book to write". The novel mixes an eccentric island backdrop - a Barker speciality - with a cast of intriguing oddballs, pin-sharp comic dialogue, and a sinister undercurrent of violence and abuse.

"Life is far more eccentric than fiction," she has said. "Things you see in life you just couldn't have in fiction because people wouldn't believe them." The Independent on Sunday called Wide Open "funny and moving, irreverent and profound", while the Impac judges paid tribute to "a manic energy and taut eloquence worthy of a large, serious and global readership".

Born in 1966, Nicola Barker emigrated to South Africa aged nine and had a "terrible time" there, culminating in her parents' separation. Five years later, she returned to England with her mother. After studying English at Cambridge University, she did a range of jobs - including working in a bakery, a bookmaker's and hospital kitchen - before becoming a full-time writer. She has written two collections of short stories, Love Your Enemies and Heading Inland, and four novels: Reversed Forecast, Small Holding, Wide Open and Five Miles from Outer Hope, which appeared earlier this year. She lives in Hackney with her partner, the writer and critic Ben Thompson, and her two dogs, Watson and Tweedie.

The Impac Award - funded by a US-based management consultancy and first awarded in 1996 - is open to all works of fiction in English or in English translation. It takes nominations from librarians in more than 30 countries before drawing up a shortlist, and has already won a reputation for favouring bold, younger voices over more established names. Last year's prize went to Andrew Miller for his first novel, Ingenious Pain. This year, the other novels on the shortlist were The Hours by Michael Cunningham, Trumpet by Jackie Kay, This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann, Charming Billy by Alice McDermott, Paradise by Toni Morrison, and I Married a Communist by Philip Roth.