Wm Heinemann cyberspace study wins RSL Jerwood Award

A book exploring digital life has won the top prize at the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction.

Laurence Scott was awarded with the £10,000 prize for his book The Four Dimensional Human, to be published by William Heinemann in summer 2015, at John Murray's house in Albemarle Street last night (27th November).

The Four Dimensional Human is described by Scott, who has a part-time lectureship at the Arcadia University in London, as a "poetics of cyberspace" from "a phenomenological and aesthetic perspective".

The judges said of it: "Laurence Scott's meditation on the way digital media have changed not only our lives but our consciousness is full of fresh ideas and written with great panache. Drawing on a wide range of reference - from Henry James to Eminem, from 19th-century futurist fiction to the fable of Beauty and the Beast - Scott illuminates our bewildering new world."

Minocher Dinshaw and Aida Edemariam both won £5,000 prizes at the awards.

Dinshaw was awarded for A Life of Sir Steven Runciman, to be published by Penguin in spring 2016. The judges said that the biography "promises to be an elegantly written account of a remarkable life, and shedding light on the cataclysmic events through which Runciman lived." Dinshaw is a recent graduate of Balliol College, Oxford.

Edemariam was honoured for an as yet untitled biography of her grandmother, due to be published by Fourth Estate in spring 2016. Through the story of her 97-year-old Ethiopian grandmother, a child bride at eight years old, Edemariam explores Ethiopia's history over the past century. The judges praised her work as "at once a poignant, intimate memoir, a revelatory history and a formally inventive work in which the truth is made as strange as the best fiction". Edemariam is a senior feature writer and editor on the Guardian.

The awards, which are now in their 11th year, were judged by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Andrew O'Hagan and Jane Ridley.