It was given yesterday to Bob Graham, a writer-artist who lives in Melbourne, for Jethro Byrde - Fairy Child (Walker Books). It is about travelling fairies in an urban setting.Graham is donating his £5,000 prize to groups helping asylum-seekers and refugees in Britain and Australia. He said: "People are arriving vulnerable, dispossessed and traumatised, often escaping from brutal regimes."I would like this to be a small expression of practical support to help them back on their feet.". Esther Freud is obsessed by houses. As a child, she would gaze at the lit-up windows of other people's houses and peer in at the figures behind, wondering what it was like to have a home.

Even today, she hasn't been able to stop herself from taking a quick look. "Just now I parked my car down there," she announces with an impish grin, "and thought, 'That would be a good place to live!' I just can't stop looking and thinking, 'I want to live in every house.' " Esther Freud is obsessed by houses. She made no attempt to hide the fact that her first novel, Hideous Kinky, about two little girls travelling around Morocco with their beautiful, bohemian mother, was heavily autobiographical. Written from the point of view of the five-year-old younger sister, it is an enchanting portrayal of childhood, made into an equally enchanting film starring Kate Winslet. It is easy to see the gamine Esther - tiny, whippet-thin and with huge, rather mesmerising, green eyes - as a waif and stray. But nowadays she has all the accoutrements of the successful grown-up. She has published four acclaimed novels, lives in Hampstead with the actor David Morrissey, and has two children, an ambition she has held since the age of three.Today we are sitting in a caf?n Belsize Park to talk about her new novel, The Sea House (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99).

Yes, houses do feature prominently, but so do an awful lot of other things. Like her third novel, Gaglow, it alternates between a contemporary present and a past which draws on her own family's European history.In Gaglow, the past was that of a prosperous German-Jewish family during the First World War and the present that of a pregnant actress posing for her father's latest painting. It was a conscious attempt to get away from the themes - of bewildered childhood, chronic anxiety, lack of parental direction - that had dominated her first two novels. It does not take a genius, however, to observe the autobiographical parallels.With The Sea House, says Freud, she had "no conscious thoughts" about trying to do something different.