Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman has won the £2,023 (about $2,575) Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in the U.K. last year. According to the Guardian, the winning novel "is set in the 2030s and follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish."
Chair of the judges Andrew M. Butler called Venomous Lumpsucker a "biting satire, twisted, dark and radical, but remarkably accessible, endlessly inventive and hilarious."
The award's director, Tom Hunter, added that the novel "takes science fiction's knack for future extrapolation and aggressively applies it to humanity's shortsighted self-interest and consumptive urges in the face of planetary eco-crisis. The result is a bleakly funny novel where the only hope for our species is working out the final punchline before it's delivered."