Australian author Richard Flanagan has won this year's Man Booker Prize for his novel ‘The Narrow Road To The Deep North’ inspired by his father's experience as a prisoner of war on the Thailand-Burma death railway.
The academic A C Grayling, who chaired the judging panel, described it as "an absolutely superb novel".
He said the book, about a surgeon struggling to save the men under his command in the camp while being haunted by an affair he had with his uncle's wife years before, was a deserved winner.
Mr Flanagan, who lives in Tasmania, was presented with the £50,000 (€62,843) prize at an awards dinner at London's Guildhall.
His success means the first two US authors ever to be shortlisted went home empty-handed.
This was the first year US authors were allowed to enter the prize, previously restricted to the UK and Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe, and led to predictions of US dominance of the long-running prize.
Mr Flanagan, whose father survived the Burma railway, travelled to Japan to meet some of the guards who mistreated the prisoners and said his father died the day he finished the novel.
Mr Grayling said the book was "not really a war novel".
He said: "It's not just about the Second World War, it's about any war and it's about the effect on a human being, an ordinary calibre of human being, of being thrown into that situation".
He added: "It's not about people shooting one another and bombs going off and so on, it's much more about people, their experience and their relationships.
"What's interesting about it is that it's very nuanced, it's as if everybody on the Burma railway on both sides of the story were victims of the situation".
He said the judging panel, which took around three hours to come to a decision, did not "bother about either the sex or the nationality of the authors whose books we were reading".
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction is Richard Flanagan with The Narrow Road to the Deep North #ManBooker2014 pic.twitter.com/nYlJwHfD8s
— Man Booker Prize (@ManBookerPrize) October 14, 2014He said: "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".
Winning the prize virtually guarantees a huge increase in sales with last year's winner, Eleanor Catton, selling almost 800,000 copies worldwide of her winning novel 'The Luminaries'.
The other books on the short list were 'We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves' by Karen Jay Fowler (US), 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour' by Joshua Ferris (US), 'J' by Howard Jacobson (UK), 'The Lives of Others' by Neel Mukherjee (UK) and 'How to be Both' by Ali Smith (UK).
In 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' Mr Flanagan takes up the story of Allied prisoners of war used as forced labour by the Japanese to build the notorious railway line.
His protagonist is Dorrigo Evans, a doctor and a soldier in the Australian army who is taken prisoner on Java, presumably in 1942.
In the despair of a Japanese POW camp, Evans is haunted byhis love affair with his young uncle's wife two years earlier.
While struggling to save the men under his command from cholera and beatings, he receives a letter that changes his life forever.
Named after a famous Japanese book by the haiku poet Basho, Mr Grayling said the novel succeeds in showing there are "extra dimensions" to the relationships between the POWs and their guards.
