Alice Oswald has become the first poet to win the £25,000 Warwick prize for writing. Her winning work, Memorial, is a reworking of Homer's Iliad.

The Warwick prize, awarded every two years, is open to works of any genre, including fiction, science, history and poetry.

Ian Sansom, chair of the judges, said it had been a "unanimous decision" to give the prize to Memorial. "Memorial is a book that looks to the present as well as the past, which combines the personal with the political, and my fellow judges and I were thrilled by its imaginative and intellectual ambition."

In 2011 Oswald withdrew Memorial from the TS Eliot prize citing concerns about its sponsorship. Memorial is published by Faber and Faber. She will be performing Memorial in full - a 70-minute perforamnce without an interval - on 21 October at the Halesworth arts festival in Suffolk.