Rose Tremain won the Orange Broadband Prize for women's fiction last night with The Road Home, a topical novel about an Eastern European immigrant.

Tremain, 64, had been shortlisted four years ago but the British author has never won any of the top three literary prizes - the Booker, the Costa and the Orange — despite being a critically acclaimed and bestselling novelist.

This time Tremain's win, with her tenth novel, came as no surprise to the publishing world and she had been the outright favourite to receive the prize at the Royal Festival Hall last night.

However, the judges took almost three hours to make a decision. There was support for the Canadian Nancy Huston, whose Fault Lines is about a gifted child, and the Londoner Charlotte Mendelson, whose When We Were Bad is the story of a wife, mother and rabbi.

Ultimately, the judges felt that Tremain's book had “captured the Zeitgeist”. Critics have praised the novel for dealing so convincingly with loss and separation.

The Road Home tells the story of Lev, a modern-day economic migrant, a charming but melancholy Pole. Having lost his wife to leukaemia, he comes to Britain with no job, little money and few words of English, searching for a sense of belonging.

The Times wrote: “Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev's passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn't made her book uglier.”

At the awards ceremony, Kirsty Lang, the broadcaster and chairwoman of the Orange jury, told The Times that they were wowed by the “emotional empathy with which she wrote the lead character”.

She said: “His arrival in London is incredibly moving. We also felt the story was told with warmth and humour. In little vignettes, she draws a Dickensian array of characters, a kebab seller, a mad chef, Chinese asparagus pickers. They are true to life, a true reflection of modern Britain.”

Tremain, who has made her name with books that often dramatise a moment of truth in the lives of outsiders, lives in Norfolk and London. Her book, The Colour, set in New Zealand during the 1860s West Coast Gold Rush, was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2004, while three of her novels are currently in development as films.

The Orange prize was set up 13 years ago to celebrate and promote fiction written in English by women throughout the world.

The organisers insisted yesterday that an all-women prize is still relevant, despite women winning prizes in fair competition with men.

In the past two years, women have won both the Booker and Costa literary awards and the novelist A.S.Byatt told The Times earlier this year that the Orange was a sexist prize. She is so critical of what it stands for, that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration.

Although Ms Lang acknowledged that it is actually impossible to guess the sex of the author in Tremain's winning book — “she's incredibly good at writing in a male voice” — Kate Mosse, the prize's co-founder, dismissed the suggestion that the Orange prize would one day accept male authors.

She said: “An anonymous donor, a wife and mother for whom reading had been a great pleasure, set up the prize money 15 years ago. It was for a prize to celebrate international writing by women. It would be complicated to change as the woman died after the first two prizes.”

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