Christos Tsiolkas won the fiction category prize of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for 2020 on Thursday for his critically acclaimed historical novel Damascus which is set in the early years of Christianity and centres around the conversion of St Paul.

Mr Tsiolkas’s first novel was 1995’s Loaded. In 2005 the Melbourne writer won the Age Book of the Year prize for his novel Dead Europe.

READ MORE: Christos Tsiolkas talks about ‘Damascus’: The dawn of a new creed

He rose to international prominence with his fourth novel, The Slap, which in 2009 earned him the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best novel in South East Asia and the South Pacific area. Other notable winners of the prize have been Nobel literary prizewinner JM Coetzee and Peter Carey.

All the novels mentioned above have been adapted to film or television series. His seventh novel, Barracuda, was also adapted for television in 2016.

Mr Tsiolkas has written nine novels and has written for the theatre and screen. He was born in Melbourne and was educated at Blackburn High School and graduated with an arts degree from the University of Melbourne in 1987.