Diana McCaulay won the £10,000 (about $13,335) Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, which recognizes a distinguished work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place, for her novel A House for Miss Pauline, published in the U.S. by Algonquin.
Emma Dabiri, one of the judges, said: "Humorous, horrific, poignant and profound, the past is far from finished in A House for Miss Pauline, Diana McCaulay's richly evocative novel about inheritances in multitude of forms, and the afterlife of slavery in Jamaica."
Claire Armitstead, another judge, added: "An evocative and powerful novel of belonging, with a fabulously eccentric protagonist, which complicates everything we assume about colonial history in all the right ways."