Richard Wins The Man Booker Prize 2014

Richard Flanagan writes a book that tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon imprisoned in a Japanese work camp on the Thailand-Burma railway where tens of thousands of people died.

Named after a classic work of Japanese literature, the book is dedicated to Flanagan's father - referred to by his prisoner number, 335.

He died aged 98 on the day his son finished the book he had been working on for 12 years.

Flanagan, 53, is the third Australian to win the prize, which includes a trophy and an award of £50,000.

"As a child, my father taught me the Japanese words 'san byaku san ju go'. It was his number, 335 that he answered to as a slave labourer of the Japanese on the Death Railway," Flanagan said.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall Attends Awards Dinner For The Man Booker For Fiction 2014

The Duchess of Cornwall presented the award

"It was, I guess, a strange mystery. Occasionally I glimpsed what that enigma might be in laughter, a grimace, a hand momentarily tensing on my shoulder, or the recited lines of others. After many years, I discovered it was also me.

"And so I am a child of the Death Railway. I am a writer. And sometimes it falls to a writer to seek to communicate the incommunicable."

The Australian writer left school at 16, before later winning a scholarship to the University of Oxford in England, where he completed a Master of Letters degree and worked as a river guide.

He initially wrote history books, before switching to fiction.

"I do not come out of a literary tradition, I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate and I never expected to stand here before you in this grand hall in London as a writer being so honoured," he said.

"The two great themes from the origin of literature are love and war: this is a magnificent novel of love and war," said academic AC Grayling, who presented the award at a ceremony attended by the Duchess of Cornwall in London's Guildhall.

"This is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write."

This was the first year writers of all nationalities have been eligible for the Booker, previously open only to authors from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of dozens of former British colonies, including Australia.

Some British writers had expressed fears that the change in eligibility could lead to US dominance of the 46-year-old award.