The 2009 Mercury Music Prize: And the winner is...

Speech Debelle – and she for one is not surprised. In a feisty speech accepting her nomination for the £20,000 prize, given annually to the best British album of the year, the 25-year-old rapper from South London warned the other 11 acts on the shortlist ahead of last night’s judgment that she planned “to take this one home”. By 10.20 last night the panel of judges agreed that she should, making Debelle the third female solo artist to win the Mercury in this century, following PJ Harvey in 2001 and Ms Dynamite in 2002, for her debut album Speech Therapy.

Jubilant in victory, Debelle singled out her granny, along with the usual list of producers, musicians and label folk in the 800 strong audience at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, for special thanks. “I’m gonna be here all night!” she announced, with evident sincerity.

Debelle’s success was not entirely unexpected: this year’s contest had been marked by its unprecedentedly high number of female nominees, five in total. But it was clear from the surprise on compere Jools Holland’s face as he opened the winning envelope, that Debelle was not considered one of the front runners. Her idiosyncratic brand of hip-hop, with its emphasis on acoustic instruments and "chamber pop" arrangements, has earned her less attention from the British public than most of the other ladies on the list.

In particular, the shock haired electro-pop diva La Roux and Florence Welsh, the iconically glamorous leader of the highly touted Florence and the Machine, were both felt to have made more impact here this year. So has the Brighton-based maverick Natasha Khan, who performs under the alias Bat For Lashes and whose second album Two Suns was a top 10 hit with over 100,000 copies sold.

Khan is often spoken of in the same glowing terms as used to be reserved for the reclusively brilliant Kate Bush. But bookies favourites have seldom scored well with this award. Over its 18 years, the Mercury Prize – now sponsored by Barclaycard rather than the defunct telecoms company that gave it its original name – has consistently overlooked albums by many of the biggest names in British popular music, notably Oasis and Radiohead. In fact the Mercury has tended to favour artists whose careers seem never to have quite recovered from the accolade: Badly Drawn Boy, Talvin Singh, Roni Size and Portishead all slid back into obscurity after cashing their cheques.

On past form the commercial shakers on the 2009 shortlist – the arena rock gods Kasabian and Glasvegas – seemed less likely to win than rank outsiders such as the punk jazz quartet Led Bib and the mysterious multi-racial funksters The Invisible. Both created quite a stir in the hall last night with their brief but energetic performances.

The most encouraging aspect of this year’s result though was the way it looked forwards rather than back. A lot of the albums in the running had an overtly retro, 1980s feel, ranging from the tribal drumming of Friendly Fires, the Siouxsie-ish posturing of Florence Welsh to the amiably gothic interventions of The Horrors – surely one of the most striking-looking groups ever to emerge from Southend-on-Sea.

Having unaccountably failed to nominate the most stylistically adventurous British album of the past 12 months, the soundtrack to Damon Albarn’s Chinese opera Monkey, and equally spurned a musically characterful and amusing second offering from Lily Allen, the Mercury judges appeared to be boxing themselves into critics’ corner: applauding cutely re-cycled versions of genres that flourished 20 years ago and are now coming back into fashion.

Speech Debelle doesn’t conform to that type. On songs such as "Daddy’s Little Girl" she speaks in her own voice often of her broken family – hence the album title Speech Therapy. And while possessed of a tense eloquence, she never shouts, harangues or sloganeers. So, another worthy Mercury winner this year then. Let’s hope that Debelle, for a change, manages to move her career onwards and upwards now that she’s carted off the prize she so set her sights on.