Andrew Miller has won the £35,000 Costa Book of the Year award for his novel Pure set in a crumbling Parisian graveyard in the years leading up to the French revolution.
The announcement was made this evening at an awards ceremony held at Quaglino's in central London.
London Evening Standard editor Geordie Greig, who chaired the judging panel, praised the book's "vivid rendition" of the era.
But he admitted the panel had been split with "quite bitter dissent" from some judges who wanted Matthew Hollis' biography of poet Edward Thomas to win.
Pure is the story of a young engineer sent to Paris on the orders of the king to demolish an ancient cemetery that is over-flowing with the dead.
Mr Greig said the novel was "a morality tale that engrosses with its vivid rendition of pre-revolutionary France".
The judges, who included novelist Patrick Gale and actor Hugh Dennis, spent 90 minutes before coming to a decision.
Mr Greig said there had been "passionately held views over two books", adding: "It really was a fierce debate and there was quite bitter dissent and argument to find the winner".
He described Mr Hollis' Now All Roads Lead To France: The Last Years of Edward
Thomas as "an incredibly subtle brilliant biography".
The other books in the running were Christie Watson's debut novel Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Carol Ann Duffy's collection of verse, The Bees, and Blood Red Road by
children's author Moira Young.
Mr Greig said judging books in such different genres was like "comparing bananas with chicken curry".
Former International Impac Dublin Literary Award winner Mr Miller has written five other novels and previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001.
Jonathan Ruppin, web editor for Foyles bookshops and a judge for the 2010 Costa Novel Award, said the win could give Bristol-born Mr Miller the "commercial success his stylish and absorbing novels have long deserved".
He said: "Pure perfectly captures the mood of a downtrodden and angry nation, on the verge of overthrowing a self-serving and out-of-touch ruling class - it's very much a book for our time."
Accepting the award, Mr Miller said it was "unsettling but deeply pleasurable" to be up on stage accepting the award.
Speaking to reporters afterwards, the 51-year-old said he had no idea what he would spend his prize money on but said he might have "a little frivolity".
He said: "What I'll spend it on is living. It's not as if writers tend to be particularly wealthy people. I certainly have no private income.
"What money we raise through events like this we pay the mortgage I'm afraid, we live off it. There may be a little frivolity, some nice shoes or something, but basically you live off it".
He said he was not sure if his next novel would have a historical setting and said he would follow the "curious path of my own obsessions".
"Writing is a kind of organised dreaming. So we do, we sit in a room and dream up strange places and strange people and set them running."
Mr Miller said he even toyed with the idea of not writing any more novels, but said: "I don't really know if I could stop. It is in very deep and has been most of my life, reading and writing, I can't really imagine a life that doesn't involve both activities at the very centre".
PA