We need to talk about yet another prize for Kevin

THE PRIZE for best film at the London Film Festival has gone to We Need To Talk About Kevin, based on Lionel Shriver's novel about a mother’s relationship with a son who goes on a shooting spree at his American high school.

Made by the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, it beat Faust, which had won at Venice, Steve McQueen's Shame and the new film from Alexander ‘Sideways’ Payne, The Descendants.

The award is the latest highlight in the history of a novel-turned-film whose future was never assured when Shriver, an American living in London, first wrote it.

Completed just after 9/11, the first draft was turned down by publisher after publisher until the small firm Serpent’s Tail picked it up.

Shriver has told how, in the absence of a PR budget, word of mouth then turned it into a bestseller. “Oddly, for a book to do well merely because people like it is surprisingly rare,” Shriver writes in an afterword to the latest paperback edition.

One of those who read the book on a friend’s recommendation was Lynne Ramsay who began the project well before it became a publishing sensation, winning the Orange Prize in 2005 and getting published in 26 languages.

As The Guardian reports, the film is Ramsay's first in nearly 10 years and only her third since her breakthrough, Ratcatcher. At the London awards ceremony, she said the prize was the "light at the end of the tunnel".

The film stars Ezra Miller as Kevin, Tilda Swinton as his mother and John C Reilly as the father. It is currently on general release in the UK.

The London Film Festival closes today.

OTHER AWARDS:

Best newcomer: Candese Reid for her her role as a homeless girl in the social drama Junkhearts.

Best first feature: Pablo Giorgelli, who won the equivalent prize at Cannes, for Las Acacias.

Best documentary: Werner Herzog for Into the Abyss, about the death penalty in Texas.

Bafta fellowships: Ralph Fiennes and David Cronenberg. ·