A debut novelist whose agoraphobia forced her to imagine the snowbound setting of her murder mystery from inside the British Library was rewarded last night with the inaugural Costa Book Award.

Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves vividly evokes the violent way of life and wintry landscape of a remote settlement in 19th-century Canada.

But Penney, 37, who lives in East London, wrote it in the grip of a 15-year phobia so acute that she refused to travel on trains, let alone fly. She had never visited Canada.

Instead, she relied on an imagination fired by a lifelong interest in polar exploration and immersed herself in accounts by employees of the Hudson Bay Fur Company which she found in the British Library.

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Extract: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

Read an extract from the winner of the inaugural Costa Book Award

• Agoraphobic author wins £25,000 for tale researched in library

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She received a cheque for £30,000 at an awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London attended by more than 450 authors, agents and publishers.

Accepting the award Penney said simply: “Thank you so, so much. This is great.”

Her refusal to visit the northern Ontario location for her novel might have helped her to write it, she said.

“Maybe it was more vivid because I would not go and look at it.

“Just because you go somewhere it doesn’t mean you have a peculiar or vivid or in-sightful take on the place. Any story takes place in the landscape of the imagination.”

She said that it had taken two and a half years after moving to London for her to pluck up the courage to travel on the bus to the British Library.

Although she has now recovered and is able to fly, the phobia remains real. “It’s not a distant memory. I don’t think it ever goes away. It’s still a big deal.”

The Edinburgh-raised film-maker has already started work on her second book, which is set in this country.

The Costa Book Awards, sponsored until last year by Whitbread, the coffee chain’s parent company, were set up in 1971 to reward “enjoyable” reads and provide competition to the Booker Prize. It is the only literary prize to pit different categories of books against one another and the judges’ decisions are frequently criticised by those who feel that a volume of poetry can never be adequately measured against a novel or a biography.

The Tenderness of Wolves, published by Quercus, is the fourth debut novel to win the overall prize and the first since Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum triumphed in 1995. The bookmakers made Penney an outsider but Armando Iannucci, the writer and director who chaired the panel, said that the decision had been relatively straightforward. “With this book we felt that it was not just an extraordinary first novel or an extraordinary novel. It was a very ambitious undertaking that was achieved successfully. I sat down thinking what on earth has this book got to say to me. Within 50 pages I was completely in love with it. It is a testimony to the power of good writing that it can present you with a world that you think you know nothing about but by the end of it you feel you own it.”

The judges included the model Erin O’Connor, the broadcaster Clive Anderson and the journalist Carol Thatcher.

Iannucci described the deliberations as “highly entertaining with a lot of contrasting views, very, very forcefully made”.

Two other books were in contention — the favourite, Keeping Mumby Brian Thompson, a memoir, and William Boyd’s spy novel, Restless. Other winners were Letter to Patience by John Haynes, which won the poetry award, and Set in Stone by Linda Newbury, which took the children’s prize.

Past winners include Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes (twice each), Kazuo Ishiguro and Philip Pullman.

Kate Saunders' review of The Tenderness of Wolves from The Times:

People keep disappearing in Dove River -two young girls, a teenage boy, and whoever murdered a trapper in his remote cabin. This is 1867, in the wilds of Canada. The author of this icy epic admits that she has never visited Canada, but she manages to conjure up an eerie landscape of the imagination -a land that seems to be struggling to fight off the new settlers from the old world. A clear-eyed Scottish woman sets out to search for her son. This is an original and readable mixture of mystery and history, with a good dollop of old-fashioned adventure.

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