Nicola Barker becomes first English author to win Goldsmiths Prize for 'fabulous, innovative' novel H(a)ppy

Nicola Barker has become the first English author to win the Goldsmiths Prize for her “fabulous, innovative” novel.

Her idiosyncratic novel H(a)ppy scooped this year's prize, which includes a £10,000 cash sum, during a ceremony at Foyles bookshop in central London on Wednesday.

The ambitious work is presented like an illuminated manuscript for the digital age, breaking up lines with coloured words, injecting spaces and diagrams, and carving symbols into the type.

Ms Barker, from Ely in Cambridgeshire, said: "Once I've finished writing a book I never think about it again.

"I kind of just move on and this book, I suppose it's about the distinction between joy, desire and pleasure. It's about what makes you happy, it's about the limits of information and truth.

"I suppose it's a book about faith, it's a book about suffering, confusion, it's a modern book but... quite crazy - I can't make any excuses for it. It's written in colour."

Ms Barker beat competition from Will Self's Phone, Gwendoline Riley's First Love, Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, Kevin Davey's Playing Possum and Sara Baume's A Line Made By Walking.

Naomi Wood, chairwoman of the judging panel and lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, praised the innovation, saying: "Nicola Barker's H(a)ppy is a structural marvel to hold in the mind and in the hands.

"Line by line, colour by colour, this dystopic utopia is an ingenious closed loop of mass surveillance, technology, and personality-modifying psychopharmaceuticals.

"H(a)ppy is a fabulous demonstration of what the Goldsmiths Prize champions: innovation of form that only ever enriches the story.

"In Barker's 3D-sculpture of a novel, H(a)ppy makes the case for the novel as a physical form and an object of art."

H(a)ppy is her 11th novel after works including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In The Approaches.