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Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll has won the £25,000 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
Carroll's The Particle at the End of the Universe (Oneworld Publications) tells the story of the hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson.
The judges were unanimous in their decision. Professor Uta Frith from University College London, who chaired the judges, said the book "is an exceptional example of the genre and a real rock star of a book. Though it's a topic that has been tackled many times before, Carroll writes with an energy that propels readers along and fills them with his own passion . . . . There's no doubt that this is an important, enduring piece of literature."
Carroll described his win as "completely unexpected" and attributed it to "the fact that we're in Higgs mania and that people were really interested in it". However, he also acknowledged that "the Higgs is an abstract concept that people have a little bit of difficulty wrapping their brains around".
Previous winners of this prize have included Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson. Each runner-up receives £2,500.
The full shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books:
Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead (Bloomsbury)
The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll (Oneworld)
Cells to Civilizations by Enrico Coen (Princeton University Press)
Pieces of Light by Charles Fernyhough (Profile Books)
The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson (Granta)
Ocean of Life by Callum Roberts (Penguin Books)