The true story of a British couple who spent four months adrift on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean, after their boat was sunk by a whale, has been named the best book of last year at a prestigious ceremony.

Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love, by Sophie Elmhirst, won the £30,000 Gold Prize at the Nero Book Awards, on Wednesday.

It tells the story of Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, who sold their Derbyshire bungalow to build a boat and set sail for New Zealand, in 1972, but had to survive at sea for 118 days after it sank.

Author Bill Bryson, who chaired the judges, called it “an enthralling, engrossing story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit”.

The Baileys set off in search of adventure in 1972 but struck disaster the following year, en route to the Galapagos Islands.

After the whale cracked a hole in their boat’s hull, they had time to deploy their 4ft (1.2m) life raft and rescue a small amount of rations.

Maralyn crafted a fishing line, using a safety pin from a first-aid kit and a piece of string, and survived on raw fish, turtles and small sharks.

She also invented card and word games and made dominoes out of scraps of paper, to keep their minds occupied.

Elmhirst, a journalist, came across the Baileys on a website dedicated to castaway stories, and set about researching their journey using Maralyn’s diary and books Maurice published after their rescue.

Her book won the Nero Book Awards Non-Fiction category in January and has now won the overall Gold Prize for Book of the Year 2024.

Bryson said: “Impressively novelistic in its narrative approach, it is a gripping retelling of a true but forgotten story.

“It is a story of a marriage as much as of an adventure at sea, one that subtly explores the dynamics of a relationship under the greatest imaginable stress.”

Elmhirst’s writing was “understated but powerful, immersing the reader intimately in the unfolding drama and the horror of struggling to survive against the odds with very few resources”, he added.

The other judges were novelist Bernardine Evaristo and journalist Emily Maitlis.

“We unanimously agreed that Maurice and Maralyn is a non-fiction work that reaches the highest literary eminence,” Bryson added.

The Nero Book Awards were previously known as the Costa Book Awards.

The Nero Book Awards winners:

• Gold Prize and Non-Fiction: Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love, by Sophie Elmhirst
• Fiction: Lost in the Garden, by Adam S Leslie
• Debut Fiction: Wild Houses, by Colin Barrett
• Children’s Fiction: The Twelve, by Liz Hyder