Leviathan, or The Whale, a personal tale about a lifelong obsession with whales by Philip Hoare, has won Britain's leading non-fiction book prize.

Hoare was named the winner of the £20,000 ($38,240 Cdn) Samuel Johnson Prize on Tuesday.

Hoare said he was inspired by Herman Melville's Moby Dick and by childhood visits to London's Natural History Museum.

He combines an examination of human interactions with whales with his personal experiences and details of his journeys to Nantucket — the starting point of Moby Dick — and other places in search of the leviathan.

"What made Leviathan stand out in a short list of wonderful reads was Philip Hoare's lifelong passion for his subject and his skill in making his readers share it. His prose is dream-like and rises to the condition of literature," said Jacob Weisberg, a U.S. journalist and chair of the jury.

Hoare, who lives in Southampton, England, is the author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant, Noel Coward: A Biography, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand and England's Lost Eden.

Founded in 1999 and named for the 18th-century essayist, the Samuel Johnson Prize is open to English-language books from any country in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. Previous winners include Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan for her book Paris 1919.

Other finalists were:

• Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed.
• Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.
• The Lost City of Z by David Grann.
• Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar.
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes.