Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein has won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing.

Her book, The Shock Doctrine, charts the exploitation of crises such as the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina by global corporations. It beat five others to win the £50,000 prize, funded by Warwick University.

Ms Klein said: “At a time when the news out of the publishing industry is usually so bleak it’s thrilling to be part of a bold, new prize supporting writing, especially alongside such an exciting array of other books.”

The competition was open to fiction and non-fiction works on the theme of “complexity”. Judge China Miéville said The Shock Doctrine was a “brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time.”

Other Jewish authors short-listed for the prize were Lisa Appignanesi for Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800, and Stuart Kauffman for Reinventing the Sacred.

Ms Klein called for a boycott of Israel in a recent article for the Guardian.