Sonali Deraniyagala wins the PEN/Ackerley prize for WAVE

The PEN/Ackerley Prize was last night awarded in absentia to Sonali Deraniyagala for WAVE (Virago), a "piercingly frank memoir of grief that begins in Sri Lanka on 26 December 2004".

Peter Parker, chair of the judges, said: "To write any kind of book about the loss of both parents, a husband and two small sons in a natural disaster is a hazardous undertaking, but in Wave Sonali Deraniyagala has produced one that goes far beyond its dreadful starting point. "Subtitled  A Memoir of Life After the Tsunami, it is as much a reclamation and celebration of the lives that were lost as it is an account of the processes of shock, grief and mourning. In a strong and varied shortlist, Wave emerged as the winner of this year's Prize because it upholds the standards that J R Ackerley himself set: truthful, unsparing, and written with outstanding grace and economy."

Lennie Goodings, Deraniyagala's editor at Virago, accepted the honour on behalf of the author, who is back in Sri Lanka, where "yesterday, in this tenth year after the tsunami, I scattered the ashes of my family at a place where the river meets the sea… A place like paradise - and so I hope that the carrying of them through these gentler waves will take them to such an eternity," she wrote in a moving speech that Goodings clearly found a challenge to read.

"For me, the writing of this book has been the opposite. It has been the way I could climb back from the hell of that giant unstoppable wave and the oblivion of my loss, and find myself in the world again. I hold that event and my beloved family in the book. This allows our life to be experienced each time someone reads it, and it is therefore never quite lost.

"The pleasure of receiving this wonderful prize makes me see that there is a beauty in struggle and a resting place in the eyes of others ... I have  found myself a writer, another identity in the ongoing bewildering journey of my life."

The PEN/Ackerley Prize, worth £3,000, is the UK's only literary prize dedicated to memoir and autobiography. It was established in memory of J R Ackerley, the author and literary editor. The other authors on this year's "exceptionally strong and diverse" shortlist were Michael Blakemore, Harry Eyres, Penelope Lively, and Julian Barnes.