[I file this under social/ cultural awareness of peak oil. Also a number of us have an interest peak oil/ climate/ collapse issues as portrayed in science fiction. Anybody read this yet?]

Sarah Hall has won the 2006/7 John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which celebrates the best fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama from the UK and the Commonwealth, with her third novel, The Carhullan Army, a tough portrait of life in a near-future Britain after the oil runs out.

The novel presents itself as the statement of a detained woman prisoner, and follows a narrator, known only as "Sister", as she escapes her regimented life of tinned food and rationed electricity to join a separatist female commune on the Cumbrian moors.

Speaking after being awarded the £5,000 prize at London's City Inn Westminster last night, Sarah Hall, who lives and works in Cumbria, said she was "very pleased" to have won, particularly given a shortlist she described as "incredible" and "intimidating".

According to Hall, one of the inspirations for such a timely book was "the flooding in Carlisle, where I live". In January 2005, when many of Cumbria's biggest towns were devastated, "you didn't have to imagine [the breakdown of society] any more".

Hall, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2002 for her second novel, The Electric Michaelangelo, did not feel duty-bound to engage with the contemporary issues - climate change, fanaticism - that sit at the core of The Carhullan Army. Rather, she said, they were impossible to ignore. "You can't get away from all this stuff on the news. As a writer I feel like a tuning fork - you're picking up vibrations of things going on around you. You can't be impervious. But the duty of a writer is to write a good story, a fucking good story"

The chair of the judges, Suzi Feay, hailed the strength of all the entries on the shortlist, calling them the books that "stuck out" amid the blur of the 120 books the judges considered. "We could remember even the weather in the shortlisted entries," she said. The shortlist revealed the strength of women's fiction - "for a while we thought we were judging the Orange prize".

She praised the courage and importance of the winning novel. "Sarah Hall's fierce, uncomfortable story of a radical dissident group holed up in the far north after the total breakdown of society seemed to all the judges to be the book that tackled the most urgent and alarming questions of today," she said. "The quality of The Carhullan Army was simply unignorable. We need writers with Hall's humanity and insight."

The Carhullan Army was one of four novels on a shortlist of six (the other two slots were taken up by non-fiction). Each of the shortlisted entries received £500. No space was found on the shortlist for poetry or drama, despite the widely-drawn remit of the prize, but Feay rejected the idea that the panel was "snubbing" poetry, suggesting that poetry would have required "special rules" for any of the submitted collections to have made the shortlist.

Last year's winner was Uzodinma Iweala for his debut novel Beasts of No Nation.