Charlotte Higgins reports in The Guardian that Susan Philipsz has won this year's Turner Prize. Philipsz is the first person in the history of the award to have sculpted her prizewinning work in sound—indeed from the sound of her own voice singing a Scottish lament over the black waters of the Clyde in her hometown, Glasgow.

Higgins writes that Philipsz, forty-five, was always the art-world favorite to win the forty-thousand-dollar prize. She received the award tonight from fashion designer Miuccia Prada, at a ceremony at Tate Britain, London. The other shortlisted artists included: Dexter Dalwood, whose contemporary take on traditional history painting saw him an early bookies’ favorite; Angela de la Cruz, whose mangled, disheveled canvases place her somewhere between painter and sculptor; and the Otolith Group, whose work, often in film, encompasses curating as well as creating. Each of the runners up receives eight thousand dollars.

Philipsz’s room in this year's Turner prize exhibition at Tate Britain consisted of her disembodied, recorded voice singing the sixteenth-century traditional Scottish song, Lowlands Away. The installation was originally made for the Glasgow International art festival in May. Beneath each of the three bridges in the city center—George V Bridge, the Caledonian railway bridge, and Glasgow Bridge—were installed recordings of Philipsz singing three slightly different versions of the same song heard in the Turner prize exhibition. In it, a drowned lover returns to haunt a sweetheart. The words are the same at first, and then, as the verses go on, take their own paths, returning to unison for the refrain.

The judges, according to a statement, “admired the way in which her work provokes both intellectual and instinctive responses and reflects a series of decisions about the relationship between sound and sight. Philipsz's work draws on the immersive properties of sound and uses her own voice to create powerful sculptural experiences.”