Irish author Paul Murray and British writer Hannah Rothschild have been announced as joint winners of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.
Murray was honoured for his latest book, The Mark and the Void, with Rothschild receiving the award for her debut novel, The Improbability of Love. The award is presented annually to works that honour the "comic spirit" of author PG Wodehouse.
Wodehouse Prize judge and broadcaster James Naughtie said it was impossible for him and his colleagues to separate Murray and Rothschild's books because they both made them laugh so much.
"And between them they produce a surfeit of wild satire and piercing humour about the subject that can always make us laugh and cry: money," he added.
A satire on the banking crisis, The Mark and the Void tells the story of a French banker living in Dublin who crosses paths with a struggling novelist keen to get his hands on a lot of money. Rothschild's The Improbability of Love is a caper set in the London art world involving a lost 18th-century masterpiece.
Dubliner Murray said he was honoured to have his work mentioned in the same breath as Wodehouse.
"I first read PG Wodehouse as a boy and have kept returning to him ever since, longer than any other writer - which makes this award very special," he said.
Murray's debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003. Its successor, Skippy Dies, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2010 and the National Book Critics' Circle Award in the United States.
As is tradition with the Wodehouse Prize, both Murray and Rothschild will each have a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig named after their winning books. They will receive their award - and meet the pigs - at the Hay Literary Festival in the UK next month.
