Heather Rose has won the 2017 Stella prize for Australian women writers for her novel, The Museum of Modern Love, based on the artwork of Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramović.

“It’s by far the biggest thing that’s ever happened in my career,” Rose told Guardian Australia.

Winning the $50,000 prize, which was established in 2013 to support and celebrate Australian women’s writing, was “extraordinary” but also came with responsibility, said Rose. “I have had the great luxury of labouring in relative obscurity for a long time, and that has allowed me to explore my strange novels with a great deal of freedom.”

She said receiving a financial reward for her book, which took 11 years to write, was gratifying, but “more than that, the sense of encouragement that an acknowledgement like this gives me is unprecedented for me”.

Society underestimates how much harder writing is for women, Rose said, whose previous novels include The River Wife (2009) and The Butterfly Man (2005). “It’s incredibly difficult as a mother and as a woman to find that solitary thinking time ... I think men and women equally work incredibly hard at their books, but I think that there’s more demanded of a woman’s time generally than there is of a man’s.

“All artists need to learn a certain amount of selfishness in order to be able to do their work.”

All writers shortlisted for this year’s Stella prize received $3,000 and a three-week writing retreat at Point Addis in Victoria. The shortlisted writers included Emily Maguire (An Isolated Incident), Catherine de Saint Phalle (Poum and Alexandre) and Maxine Beneba Clarke (The Hate Race), alongside two posthumous accolades for Georgia Blain (Between a Wolf and a Dog) and Cory Taylor (Dying: A Memoir).

The Museum of Modern Love is Rose’s reimagining of Abramović’s 2010 performance of The Artist is Present, in which the artist sat at a table in the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York in silence every day for three months, inviting members of the public to sit opposite her and exchange meditative gazes.

While Abramović and her work is the axis on which the novel turns, the narrative drive comes from the stories of people who come to participate in the performance, often at a crossroads in their own lives.

Rose has met Abramović in person only once, although she participated in the 2010 performance four times. Rose sought and received permission from the artist to include her as a character in the novel, and interviewed many of the audience members who had participated in or watched the performance at Moma.

Abramović reportedly was very pleased with the final novel.

Brenda Walker, chair of the 2017 prize judging panel, which also included Delia Falconer, Diana Johnston, Sandra Phillips and Benjamin Law, said of The Museum of Modern Love: “It is rare to encounter a novel with such powerful characterisation, such a deep understanding of the consequences of personal and national history, such affection for a city and people who are drawn to it, and such dazzling and subtle explorations of the importance of art in everyday life.”

Rose had originally envisaged writing about an artist inspired by Abramović, but sitting with Abramović during the 2010 performance fundamentally changed the basis of the book.

“I knew when I sat with her that I could no longer do a fictionalised version of her, she had to be herself,” Rose said. “Because the sitting with her was so strange and so otherworldly, but also so terribly secular, that I thought there’s no way I can ever tell the power of this woman’s story by fictionalising her.”

Rose’s early research for the novel involved diving through the boxes of books that would later become curator David Walsh’s library at Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). When Mona was built, Walsh gave Rose her own research space adjacent to the library to support her writing, even reading and giving feedback on an early draft of the novel.

“It was a very insistent story,” said Rose. “It wouldn’t leave me alone. And I had to learn to be a better writer to write it. It took everything.”