Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Imperial Life In The Emerald City, an account of Baghdad's Green Zone, has won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the former Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, wowed judges with his book on the home of the US headquarters in Iraq, which he describes as an enclave of luxury villas and sparkling swimming pools.

His account is of a place cut off from wartime realities, with bars stocked with cold beers, discos where women dance in hot pants, shopping centres selling porn and all-you-can-eat buffets piled high with pork. Baroness Helena Kennedy, chairwoman of the judges, said: "Imperial Life in the Emerald City is up there with the greatest reportage of the last 50 years — as fine as John Hershey on Hiroshima and Capote's In Cold Blood.

"The writing is cool, exact and never overstated and in many places very humorous as the jaw-dropping idiocy of the American action is revealed.

"Chandrasekaran stands back, detached and collected, from his subject but his reader is left gobsmacked, right in the middle of it." The US author's book beats five others on the shortlist, including Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma, about the killing of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh by a young Muslim in 2004. The others were Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties by Peter Hennessy; Daughter of the Desert by Georgina Howell; Brainwash by Dominic Streatfeild and The Verneys by Adrian Tinniswood.

Chandrasekaran draws on hundreds of interviews and internal documents in his book, identifying a 24-year-old who, he writes, had no experience in finance but was put in charge of revitalising Baghdad's stock exchange, and a US aide who it is claimed based the city's new traffic laws on those in the state of Maryland in the US, downloaded from the Internet.

Chandrasekaran, who lives in Washington in the US, is assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, and heads the newspaper's online continuous news department.

From 2003 to 2004, he was bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the US occupation of Iraq and supervising a team of Post correspondents.

He lived in Baghdad for six months before the war, reporting on the UN weapons inspections process and the build-up to the conflict. The BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize is the world's richest prize for non-fiction, recognising works published in English in the UK by authors of any nationality.

Chandrasekaran received the award recently at a ceremony in the Savoy Hotel.

— By arrangement with The Independent