Melbourne writer Aisling Smith has won the $10,000 Richell prize for emerging writers for 2020 for what the judges hailed as an “assured and evocative” novel.

More than 800 entries were submitted for the prize, which is co-presented by publishing company Hachette Australia, the Emerging Writers festival and Guardian Australia. In addition to offering the winner $10,000, it also grants them a 12-month mentorship with a publisher at Hachette Australia.

“Without a doubt, this is the biggest thing to happen to me professionally,” Smith, 32, told Guardian Australia. “I’m super grateful and humbled by the whole thing.”

The Richell prize is awarded annually and open to unpublished writers of long-form adult fiction and adult narrative non-fiction.

Smith’s novel, Petrichor, is a magical realist work that follows the character of a man called Benjamin and the disintegration of his family relationships through the eyes of the women in his life.

Smith said she was inspired to write in the magical realist genre by AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, and the idea that “the fantastical underlies the world we live in”.

“[Byatt] talks about characters walking around with this awareness that things have visible as well as invisible forms. I like this idea that folklore, the supernatural, the fantastical, gives rise to different possibilities for [ways of] seeing the world that we live in,” she said.

Petrichor is also a work about diaspora, Smith said, with one of the narrators having moved to Australia from Fiji – an experience Smith said she drew on from that of her own family – and about the way Australia has changed over the course of 30 years.

The judges described Smith’s writing as “polished and sophisticated”, saying Petrichor was “a work that reveals an assured and evocative new Australian literary voice using the disintegration of a marriage to explore powerful themes around communication, race, culture and family”.

This year’s prize was judged by Hachette publisher Vanessa Radnidge, author Hannah Richell, Galina Marinov from the Australian Booksellers Association, and Jon Page from Dymocks Sydney.

Smith’s publication history to date has included writing and editing for Monash University-based literary anthology Verge and Deakin’s Veranda Journal. She recently completed a PhD in literature on author David Foster Wallace.

Smith’s work was chosen from a final shortlist of five, including the manuscripts of The Boy Who Wept Rabbits by Benjamin Forbes, Meddies by Kerry Jewell, Flaring Out by Scott Limbrick, and Cities of Refuge by Mark Hennessy.

The Richell prize was established in memory of Hachette Australia’s CEO, Matt Richell, who died suddenly in 2014.