Alan Johnson's memoir of London slum childhood wins £10,000 Ondaatje prize

Judges say evocative language of ex-home secretary's This Boy helps readers 'smell the pie and mash' of postwar Notting Hill

• Alison Flood - theguardian.com, Tuesday 20 May 2014 

Ondaatje prize-winner Alan Johnson on his memoir, This Boy: 'Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant were not often seen down our way.' Photograph: Geoff Pugh/Rex

Alan Johnson's memoir of his childhood in the slums of west London has won the former home secretary and Labour MP the £10,000 Ondaatje prize, an unusual literary award which goes to the book that best evokes the spirit of a place.

Johnson's This Boy, said judge and poet Imtiaz Dharker, "makes you walk the postwar streets with him, smell the sixpenny pie and mash, and hear the sound of the meter gobbling shillings in the condemned housing of Notting Hill". 
Johnson beat shortlisted authors including Patrick Barkham, the Guardian journalist whose Badgerlands tells of our relationship with badgers, and Nadeem Aslam's novel The Blind Man's Garden, set in post 9/11 Pakistan and Afghanistan, to win the Royal Society of Literature prize on Monday.
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