Hilary Spurling has won the £25,000 Whitbread Book of the Year award, beating the bookmakers' favourite, The Accidental by Ali Smith.

Matisse the Master is the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse, and was also shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.

Spurling said: "If Matisse knew the way that this award went tonight he would see it as another tribute from a country that responded to him and loved him always from the beginning."

Matisse the Master is the fifth biography to take the overall Whitbread prize. Claire Tomalin was the last biographer to take the prize in 2002 for Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self.