A critic who accused a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of scattering literary allusions like "tin cans tied to a tricycle" has won a prize for the year's most lacerating book review.

Adam Mars-Jones' review of Michael Cunningham's novel "By Nightfall" was named the winner of the Hatchet Job of the Year Award.

The review condemns the novel's pretensions, saying it is "filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art."

Mars-Jones, a British-born novelist, was awarded a golden hatchet and a year's supply of potted shrimp at a ceremony Tuesday in London.

The U.K.-centric prize was established by review aggregating website The Omnivore to honor "the angriest, funniest, most trenchant" review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011.