A former Yorkshire Evening Post journalist has won a prestigious literary award after writing about his experiences covering the Iraq War.

Oliver Poole has been named as the 2009 winner of the Montaigne Medal for his book Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad.

The critically-acclaimed work details his experience as a Daily Telegraph reporter covering the Iraq War and tells of his struggle to save his translator Ahmed Ali from the militias hunting him for the aid he was providing the international press.

Members of Ali’s family were killed and he was forced to flee as a refugee to Syria before, with Oliver’s help, he was finally able to relocate and start a new life in the US with his wife and two young children.

Oliver said he was delighted and surprised to receive the award. “It is a great honour,” he said.

“You live through an experience like I did in Iraq and then you write about it because you want people to know what happened to that country. To have your efforts recognised after going through all that is a wonderful thing.”

He first crossed into Iraq in March 2003, from Kuwait, as a Telegraph reporter ’embedded’ in the back of an American armoured vehicle. Three weeks later, his unit had fought their way to Baghdad.

He returned as the paper’s Baghdad bureau chief and found a country racked by suicide bombs and the burgeoning Sunni-Shia civil war. There he met Ali and for the next two years they worked out of the Baghdad hotel suite where Poole lived.

During that time the hotel was regularly attacked by suicide bombers and many of their friends and colleagues were killed or kidnapped. By mid-2006 Poole was the only British reporter working for a British newspaper still permanently based in Iraq.

Oliver joined the Telegraph in 1999 after working at the South China Morning Post and the YEP.

A percentage of every copy sold of Red Zone is being donated to International Pen, an organisation for the promotion of freedom of speech which helped Poole secure Ali’s new life in America.