EVEN IN THE WEEK WHEN the 40-year “Best of the Booker” is announced, it's sometimes hard to get excited about book prizes. There are, after all, quite a few of them, and occasionally (when you have to remember that the Whitbread has become the Costa and we now must say the Orange “Broadband” Prize for fiction) they can seem, all too plainly, like branding exercises. Never mind how we all feel when the people dragooned to give them out (not such a hard job, really, for the Welsh Heritage Minister?) manage to announce the wrong winner, as happened to poor Tom Bullough (author of the lovely novel The Claude Glass) ten days ago at the Wales Book of the Year Awards dinner.

So a prize that seems genuinely novel and interesting is a treasure. Congratulations to the University of Warwick on its new - and, at £50,000 for the winner, very rich - prize: the Warwick Prize for Writing.

The prize considers all writing as creative writing: this is a cross-disciplinary award. It will be given every two years for an “excellent and substantial” piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form. The theme will change with every prize: the 2009 theme is “Complexity”. Nominations will come from all staff members at the university - gardeners and nursery staff included, as are honorary professors and graduates. The first year's chair of judges is China Miéville, the award-winning writer of what he describes as “weird fiction”. Other judges include Professor Ian Stewart, the mathematician, and the literary blogger Stephen Mitchelmore. There will be a longlist in October, a shortlist in January 2009, and a winner the following month. “The winning submission,” runs the press release, “will represent an intellectual, scientific and/or imaginative advance and be written with an energy and clarity that make it accessible and attractive to a wide audience.”

I love the sound of this prize. While I understand that shelf-marks can be useful - this is a prize for fiction, this is a prize for biography - the best books, surely, are the ones that defy categorisation. On the Origin of Species: science, yes, but literature, too. Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker: science fiction, yes, but philosophy too. Is The Waste Land “just” a poem? Of course not. I'll lay a bet that the longlist for this prize will be the most interesting we've seen for a long time - and I'll look forward to celebrating the winner.