Author Ali Smith has walked away with this year's £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction.

Smith's novel How to be Both, about the lives of an Italian fresco painter and a teenage girl grieving for her mother, is published in two versions allowing the stories to be read in a different order.

Judges praised the novel, chosen from a short-list of six, for being "a playful and profound book that pushes the novel into thrilling new shapes."

Ali Smith's previous work includes Booker-nominated The Accidental and There but for the, which was set in Greenwich.

She said: "This prize is really about the thing closest to your heart if you work with the novel as a form, if you’re interested in the form of the novel and the form of language."

The prize was launched by the New Cross university last year, when it was won by Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing.