AN eccentric poet who has rejected much of the trappings of modern life has won Britain's most lucrative literary award.

Gillian Allnutt was last night named the winner of the annual £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award at a ceremony at Gateshead's Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

The opulent surroundings of the Baltic are a far cry from her home, a miner's cottage on the outskirts of Durham City, where she lives in solitude without the modern-day luxuries of a television or washing machine, saying she finds washing by hand therapeutic.

The 56-year-old teacher plans to use the prize money to take a sabbatical so she can travel, concentrate on her writing - and repair her leaking roof.

She said: "The award couldn't have come at a better time. I see it as an affirmation, a surface-anchoring of my faith in myself and my work.

"There are one or two practical things I'll be looking at - like a new roof and a computer - but, really, I'll be using the money just to live on. I want to live in a more civilised manner - to have more time for people.

"I have taught for many years and I am nervous about having a real break, but I just feel it is the right thing to do."

The Cambridge graduate, who began writing at the age of seven, moved to the North-East from her native London in 1988, after leaving her high-profile job as poetry editor of City Limits.

After a spell in Newcastle, she ended up in the County Durham pit village of Esh Winning.

She said: "I wheeled my bike over the ridge one day, saw the For Sale sign outside this house and just knew I was going to live here in the terrace. It is a very supportive community."

She has since published six collections of her poems, described by the judges as "serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound", including, most recently, Sojourner, in 2004, Lintel, in 2001, and Nantucket and the Angel, in 1997.

Her poems cover many topics, ranging from early women writers, the death of her mother last year, spirituality and places close to her heart, ranging from the North-East to medieval Russia.

Neil Astley, of Bloodaxe Books, said: "Gillian has spent her whole life reading, writing and sharing her love of quietly powerful, meditative poetry with others. Such work is too often overlooked in these clamorous times when writers who shout the loudest are often the only people who get heard."

Critic Gordon Burn, one of the judges who unanimously awarded the prize to Gillian, said: "The sequence of poems and the death and life of her mother struck us as particularly original and moving.

"Here was a writer, we felt, who was entering a hard-won new phase of her work."

Fiona Ellis, director of the Northern Rock Foundation, said: "She is one of the most original poets writing in the UK today, and if this award helps her in any way to concentrate on her writing, then the world of literature will be a far richer place."

Previous winners have been Anne Stevenson, in 2002, Julia Darling, in 2003, and Tony Harrison, in 2004.

* See tomorrow's Northern Echo for an in-depth interview with Gillian Allnutt.