CHRISTOPHER LOGUE, the poet who has spent half a lifetime rewriting The Iliad, has won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry.

Logue, 78, started working on Homer’s epic in the late 1950s after a commission for BBC radio. He cannot read Greek — “neither modern nor Ancient” — but for 40 years he has been a war correspondent on the fields of Troy, publishing five reports in blank verse. His fifth and penultimate account, Cold Calls, was praised by the judges for its “graphic, bloodsoaked, bawdy” rendering of the battle. “I don’t expect to finish the final instalment,” he said yesterday. “It will finish me.”

Mr Logue was one of five Whitbread winners on a day when the judges confounded predictions — and when war seemed to rumble behind all the chosen texts.

Ali Smith, the Scottish author, won the Novel Award, beating Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby with The Accidental, which tells of a holiday in Norfolk disrupted by the arrival of a stranger. “It was about the year 2003 when the UK was at war but didn’t know it,” Smith said. “We had a glorious summer, we lived through something without living through it. It’s the story of that bubble, and the story of the foreigner, of them and us, which infuses our political culture.”

In the First Novel category, Tash Aw, another outsider, won the prize for his book The Harmony Silk Factory. Aw, 34, is a recent graduate of the creative writing department of the University of East Anglia, which has fostered many of Britain’s contemporary literary names.

He funded his writing by taking odd jobs — as a gardener, painter and decorator, and eventually, in desperation, as a lawyer with Simmons and Simmons, the City law firm. The non-fiction award went to Hilary Spurling, for Matisse the Master, a work begun 15 years ago. Kate Thompson won the award for Children’s Fiction with The Policeman, which the judges described as “a captivating Irish tale”.

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