Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel The Detour.

The prize, awarded each year by the British Independent newspaper, includes a cheque for nearly €12,000.

The Detour is the story of a woman from Amsterdam who escapes to a remote farmhouse in Wales when her affair with a student ends.

The Independent said of the book, published in 2010 and translated by David Colmer, that Bakker ‘makes of rural Wales an eerie site of mystery and menace’.

The 51-year old Bakker is in good company. Earlier winners of the Foreign Fiction Prize include José Saramago and Orhan Pamuk, both of whom also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.