Interview: Charting icy wastes brings top award

As well as being one of the country's oldest literary prizes it is a good arbiter of talent, with past winners including Sir Andrew Motion, Margaret Drabble and William Boyd.

For Sackville, 29, the award is worth more than the 5,000 prize money. "I honestly didn't expect to win, I was genuinely surprised, but it's nice to be recognised for something you've written and for it to have some kind of value," she says.

The Still Point, described by the judges as "breathtaking", is set against the backdrop of the story of Edward Mackley, an adventurer who disappears during an attempt to reach the North Pole at the turn of the last century. The story is then transported forward 100 years to the discovery of his diary by his wife's great-grand-niece Julia.

"I'm fascinated by families and relationships and what draws people together," explains Sackville. She writes elegantly, too, about the icy wastelands through the refractions of changing light. Fellow author Francis Spufford is among those leading the praise for the young literary star.

"If Virginia Woolf had had a younger sister with a passionate interest in icebergs, she might have written something like this beautiful, unearthly novel, in which the secrets of a house and of a marriage continually open out onto a wild glare of Arctic light."

In some respects, Sackville is an old-fashioned writer which belies her literary influences, including those great Modernist monoliths Joyce and Eliot. However, she admits her story evolved differently to how she envisaged it would. "I wanted to write about the Arctic because I was interested in the polar landscape in terms of its imagery, but I wasn't sure what to write." But when she began trawling through explorers' diaries from more than a century ago, her original short story idea developed into a full blown novel.

Sackville spent three years studying English and Theatre Studies at Leeds University, before going to Oxford University and then completing a creative writing course at London's Goldsmiths College.

"I read from an early age and I always enjoyed writing, but not necessarily writing fiction. For me, writing an essay is just as creative and can be just as rewarding. I loved my time in Leeds and it was transformative because, looking back, I realise that's where a lot of my ideas for this book first came from – that's where it all started."

PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG AUTHOR

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds University, before receiving an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford and then completing an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmith's College, London. The Still Life was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction earlier this year.