LOCAL author Jasper Fforde has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the annual prize for comic fiction, with his third book, The Well of Lost Plots.

"Previous winners have been either literary masterpieces of great humour - The Mighty Waltzer, Spies, or savage satires - Vernon God Little, The Rotter's Club," said Hay Festival director Peter Florence.

"This year's winner has the true Wodehousian joy of brilliant verbal playfulness, and seems genuinely and outrageously original. The robustness of the comedy is matched with imaginative fireworks in plotting."

Among his prizes, Jasper Fforde won a fibre-glass replica of a Gloucester Old Spot pig named after the winning novel.