British-Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie has won the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel Home Fire, from 6 shortlisted titles.

Home Fire, which reworks Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone to tell the story of a British Muslim family’s connection to the Islamic State, was described by the judges as a book that ‘spoke for our times’ and it ‘sustains mastery of its themes and its form’. ‘It is very readable, it’s extremely well written, it’s well plotted, it’s something that could easily be a brilliant television series or film,’

Other shortlisted titles were

• The Idiot (Elif Batuman, Penguin)
• The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock (Imogen Hermes Gowar, Harvill Secker)
• Sight (Jessie Greengrass, John Murray)
• When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Meena Kandasamy, Atlantic)
• Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward, Bloomsbury)