LONDON - Novelist Anna Burns from Northern Ireland won the Man Booker Prize for fiction for her work Milkman, it was announced on Tuesday evening.

The award, one of the most prestigious in international literature and open to authors writing in the English language, was presented to the 56-year-old at a ceremony in the Guildhall in the heart of the City of London.

Burns is the first author from Northern Ireland to win the prize.

Her novel is set during the late 1970s and revolves around an 18-year-old woman's affair with an older paramilitary figure known as "the milkman".

Although it is not explicitly named, the city mentioned in the book is Belfast and the era is the period known as the Troubles, when terror groups fought the British Army and state for decades over the sovereignty of the area, which had once been part of Ireland.

Booker Prize judges chairman Kwame Anthony Appiah said the book was "incredibly original".

Appiah said: "None of us has ever read anything like this before. Anna Burns' utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humor.

"The novel is enormously rewarding if you persist with it. Because of the flow of the language and the fact some of the language is unfamiliar, it is not a light read; I think it is going to last."

Milkman beat competition from Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, who, at 27, was the youngest nominee in Man Booker history. The other nominees were The Long Take by Robin Robertson, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, and The Overstory by Richard Powers.

The shortlisted authors each receive a prize of 2,500 pounds ($3,300) and a specially bound edition of their book. Burns receives a further 50,000 pounds and can expect international book sales to boom.

Last year, sales of the winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders increased by 1,227 percent, and the book has to date sold more than 230,000 copies, with 70 percent of those sales coming after the win.

The Booker Prize began in 1969 and was opened up in 2013 to writers beyond Britain and the Commonwealth on condition that their novels are published in Britain and Ireland.

Xinhua