London - Defeated Booker Prize nominee Matthew Kneale (40) last night won the £22,500 Whitbread Book of the Year award for his English Passengers. The judges had wanted to call it a tie, awarding the prize jointly to Kneale's book and the late Lorna Sage's Bad Blood - A Memoir, but panel chairman Sir Tim Rice his casting vote.
The decision broke a four-year run of poetry volumes which had dominated the Whitbread. Sir Tim said: "Whichever way we went about it we came down to a tie - we would have liked to have given a tie."
