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A New Zealand academic teaching at Scotland's Dundee University has won stg25,000 ($NZ71,000) in a United Kingdom book competition.
Kirsty Gunn was named at the weekend as the inaugural winner of the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award.
The professor of creative writing at Dundee University was awarded the prize at the Edinburgh International Book Festival for her novella The Boy And The Sea.
Gunn, educated at Wellington's Victoria University, and Oxford University in England, initially worked as a freelance journalist when she moved to London.
A spokeswoman for the judging panel said of Gunn's book: "It is a novella of consummate subtlety, imaginative daring and emotional intensity, capturing the anguish of adolescent sensitivity and mystery in an intimate yet elemental story, rendered in a poetic prose of dazzling lyricism."
Gunn told the Sunday Herald in Glasgow that she was delighted with the award because "literary fiction in general doesn't get enough attention".
"The middlebrow has become predominant, and the bookshops are full of Jamie Oliver..."
- NZPA
