Booker prizewinner 2014: a 'magnificent story of love and war '

Australian novelist Richard Flanagan has won the 2014 Booker Prize for his wartime novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, inspired by his father's time working on the infamous Death Railway between Burma and Thailand as a Japanese prisoner of war.

In his acceptance speech, Flanagan, the third Australian to win the prize after Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey, said the money would be put to good use. Before he had been shortlisted for the prize, he had been so strapped for cash that he had considered working in the mines in South Australia, The Guardian reports.

"I never expected to stand here before you in this grand hall in London as a writer, being so honoured", he told the audience at the Guildhall.

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Flanagan, who received the prize from the Duchess of Cornwall, was chosen from a shortlist of six: British writers Howard Jacobson, Neel Mukherjee and Ali Smith, and the Americans Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler.

This was the first year in which the Booker Prize had been open to all authors writing in English. Previously, only Commonwealth, Irish and Zimbabwean writers had qualified.

Last year's prize went to Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, for The Luminaries.

What makes the book a prize-winner?

AC Grayling, chair of the judges, said it was a "remarkable love story as well as a story about human suffering and comradeship", the BBC reports. Grayling said that it took the judges several rounds of voting and three hours to arrive at a majority decision, according to The Independent. "The best and worst of judging books is when you come across one that kicks you so hard in the stomach like this that you can't pick up the next one in the pile for a couple of days. That's what happened in the case of this book," he added.

Catherine Taylor, reviewing the novel for the Daily Telegraph, described the novel as "graceful and unfathomable", one of "unflinching telling", while Carl Wilkinson of the Financial Times said Flanagan is "one of Australia's finest novelists".

His "technique is both dizzying and heartbreaking; an entire life encapsulated in a page or two", she added.