China Miéville has won the £10,000 Goldsmiths prize for The Rouse, a 1,264-page epic that is part paranormal thriller, part historical saga moving through decades of British imperial and cold war history.

The win, announced at a ceremony in London on Wednesday, makes The Rouse the longest novel to take the prize since it was launched in 2013 to reward fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form”.

The novelist Francis Spufford, who chaired the judges, said all the books on the shortlist were excellent, but “it seemed only right to give this year’s Goldsmiths prize to the one that, in terms of ambition, bold use of history, linguistic experiment and sheer scale, broke most explosively with expectation”.

Miéville has called The Rouse, which was 20 years in the writing, “the defining book of my life, that I’ve been writing for most of my adulthood” in an interview with the New Statesman, which co-founded the prize with Goldsmiths, University of London.

The novel opens in…