Prayaag Akbar has won the Booker Prize for his novel "The Calcutta Correspondence," a narrative spanning three centuries of the city's history told through letters, interrogation transcripts, colonial records, and contemporary text messages — a formal innovation that the Booker judges described as "the most structurally ambitious Indian novel in English since Midnight's Children."

Akbar, 41, who grew up between Lucknow and London and now divides his time between Mumbai and Paris, is the first Indian citizen — as opposed to Indian-born authors living abroad — to win the Booker since Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" in 1997.

"Calcutta has always been India's most literary city — the city that argues most loudly with itself about what it is and what it could have been," Akbar said in his acceptance speech at London's Roundhouse venue. "I wanted to find a form that was worthy of its complexity."

The novel had been longlisted and then shortlisted against considerable international competition, including novels from Nigeria, Australia, and Jamaica. Its Booker win has already prompted pre-order surges in India, where a Hindi translation by Gopaldas Neeraj's granddaughter is scheduled for release in September.