Sarah Hall has been awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2006/07 for her novel The Carhullan Army – an exhilarating yet disturbing tale set in a Britain of the future.

Judges praised the book for tackling the “most urgent and alarming questions of today” and chose it for the £5,000 prize above Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places and Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards.

The novel, published by Faber and Faber, paints an absorbing vision of a Britain ravaged by a mysterious war, economically ruined, and controlled by a faceless dictatorship known as “the Authority”. It is told through the eyes of “Sister” who cannot accept her role as a factory drone and instead escapes to Carhullan to join the self-sufficient, female-only community hidden in the hills of Cumbria.

The chair of judges, Suzi Feay, Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday, said: "Sarah Hall's fierce, uncomfortable story seemed to all judges to be the book that tackled the most urgent and alarming questions of today. The quality of The Carhullan Army was simply unignorable. We need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

The other judges were the novelist Peter Hobbs and the novelist and poet Michele Roberts.

Hall is no stranger to success – her first novel, Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best Fiction Book and her second, The Electric Michelangelo, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004.

She joins the ranks of Margaret Drabble, William Boyd, Jeanette Winterson and Jonathan Coe, who previously won the prize, founded 65 years ago in honour of the writer John Llewellyn Rhys, who was killed in action during the Second World War. Last year’s winner was Uzodinma Iweala for his debut novel Beasts of No Nation.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy