Women's Prize for Fiction: Barbara Kingsolver wins for Demon Copperhead

This year's Women's Prize for Fiction has gone to Barbara Kingsolver for Demon Copperhead, a modern reimagining of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield.

Kingsolver, who besides won successful 2010 for The Lacuna, is the archetypal writer to instrumentality the prize twice.

She said Dickens wrote his 1850 caller "to protestation the ravages of poorness connected the children of his time", adding: "I wrote excavation for the aforesaid reason."

The judges called it "a towering, profoundly almighty and important book".

Relocating the communicative from Victorian England to the modern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, Demon Copperhead tells the communicative of a lad calved successful a trailer parkland who navigates foster care, labour exploitation, addiction, emotion and loss.

Former BBC Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin, who chaired the Women's Prize judges, said it was "a unanimous decision".

The publication serves arsenic "an exposé of modern America, its opioid situation and the detrimental attraction of deprived and maligned [rural] communities", Minchin said.

"Brilliant and visceral, it is storytelling by an writer astatine the apical of her game. We were each profoundly moved by Demon, his gentle optimism, resilience and determination contempt everything being acceptable against him."

Kingsolver explained that it was "challenging and besides amusive to transpose Victorian characters and situations to my ain spot and time" for her 10th novel.

Minchin presented the US writer with the £30,000 prize astatine a ceremonial successful London connected Wednesday. Demon Copperhead besides won the Pulitzer Prize for fabrication earlier this year.

Now successful its 28th year, the Women's Prize honours "outstanding, ambitious, archetypal fiction" written successful English by pistillate writers from astir the world.