Klein wins UK prize for book

Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein has won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing.

Her book, The Shock Doctrine, charts the exploitation of crises such as the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina by global corporations. It beat five others to win the £50,000 prize, funded by Warwick University.

Ms Klein said: “At a time when the news out of the publishing industry is usually so bleak it’s thrilling to be part of a bold, new prize supporting writing, especially alongside such an exciting array of other books.”

The competition was open to fiction and non-fiction works on the theme of “complexity”. Judge China Miéville said The Shock Doctrine was a “brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time.”

Other Jewish authors short-listed for the prize were Lisa Appignanesi for Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800, and Stuart Kauffman for Reinventing the Sacred.

Ms Klein called for a boycott of Israel in a recent article for the Guardian.