The American author Cormac McCarthy, long revered for the hardbitten poetry of his novels, has won the UK's oldest and most literary of book awards.

The 74-year-old, was awarded the James Tait Black memorial prize, worth £10,000, for his bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic America, The Road.

The book won a Pulitzer, the US's pre-eminent literary prizes, earlier this year, and is being widely noised as a strong Nobel contender.

The novel describes the journey of a father and son who are heading south in a world where a disaster has occurred, reducing nature to a nuclear-grey winter and humans to savage, scavenging cannibals.

While the landscape is scorched and some of the set-piece encounters almost Beckettian, the nightmare vision is leavened by McCarthy's austere language and his description of the powerful bond between the boy and his father.

The book, McCarthy's 10th, has been hailed by critics as a masterpiece but it has also achieved commercial success, having been featured by Oprah Winfrey's television book club.

An American cousin to the UK's Richard and Judy Book Club, the show is capable of giving a gigantic boost to sales, and caused controversy some years back when Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections had been selected by Winfrey, was de-selected when he said the show’s attention made him ‘cringe’.