BRITAIN: The popular favourite also turned out to to be the judges' fervent choice. In one of the most welcomed outcomes for years to a Whitbread book contest, Mark Haddon's novel told from inside the mind and heart of an autistic teenager carried off the £30,000 (€43,377) prize last night.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which has delighted reviewers and so far enthralled 80,000 readers, was declared a clear winner at the end of a two-hour judging session. One judge said rhapsodically that the book had "used disability to throw a light upon the world".
The nine judges disposed rapidly of the rival claims of this year's Booker prize winner, DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little, the bookies' second favourite. But the chairman, the pioneer television arts presenter Joan Bakewell, singled out for special mention the shortlist poetry entry, Don Paterson's collection Landing Light, which she called "something really special".
The chief glory and the money went to Haddon, already winner of the Guardian children's fiction prize for a book which doubled as his first adult novel. He has published 16 children's stories.
The Curious Incident was runaway favourite on a website launched by Whitbread organisers this year. It has also been issued in a children's edition, which has sold equally well. Its first impact was by word of mouth among readers. At Christmas, the adult version outsold such authors as John Le Carre, Robert Harris and Patricia Cornwell.
Its narrator, Christopher (15) child of a broken marriage, has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism.
According to one definition, this is "characterised by severe and sustained impairment in social interaction, development of restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, and activities".
Christopher uses his mathematical flair and sense of the patterns in the outside world to try to puzzle out his life, and to investigate, Sherlock Holmes-style, the killing of a neighbour's dog.
This plunges him into a nightmare rush-hour journey alone like a trapped animal on the London tube, but also leads him to moments of triumph.
Haddon has said: "When I was writing I really thought to myself, who on earth is going to want to read about a 15-year-old kid with a disability living in Swindon with his father? And I thought, I better make the plot good." Bakewell called it "an absolutely fantastic book, quite exceptional in the way Haddon is able to express the voice of the child and to get into the boy's language. It is extraordinary because of the limitations he has put on himself. He manages to reveal the boy as a thinking and tender person.
"We also thought it terribly funny. None of the judges has known anything like it".