British author wins International Booker in stunning upset — and refuses to give interviews

Reclusive novelist Sarah Pendleton takes top prize for debut that 'rewrites what fiction can do'.

British novelist Sarah Pendleton has won this year's International Booker Prize for her debut work 'The Quiet Architecture', a 380-page novel told entirely through architectural blueprints and the marginal notes scribbled across them.

The decision has stunned the literary world. Pendleton, a former structural engineer who has never given a public reading, was considered a long-shot against three previous winners on the shortlist.

Who is Sarah Pendleton?

Within minutes of the announcement, her publisher confirmed she would not be attending the press conference and 'has no intention of giving interviews, now or in the future'.

Critics have praised the novel as 'a quiet earthquake' and 'a book that asks what reading itself even means'. The chair of judges described it as 'unlike anything we have read before'.

First-edition copies, already scarce, vanished from major retailers within an hour of the announcement.