Materials book wins Royal Society Winton Prize 10 November 2014 Last updated at 19:40 By Melissa Hogenboom Science reporter, BBC News A book exploring the importance of materials has won the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. Prof Mark Miodownik's Stuff Matters looks at everything from the everyday objects in our home to new wonder materials that will shape our future. His work beat five other titles covering topics ranging from biomedical innovations to the elements that have changed our world. The judges decided unanimously to award Prof Miodownik the £25,000 prize. Each of the five runners-up received £2,500. The full title of Prof Miodownik's work is: Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World. His fascination with materials began after he was stabbed in the back with a steel razor blade "not much bigger than a postage stamp" by a mugger. He became obsessed with how such a small object could be so sharp, strong and capable of easily cutting through five layers of clothes. "Once I had got into steel, everything else started to come into my focus," Prof Miodownik told the BBC's Life Scientific programme earlier this year. He added that making objects from materials was as important as reading and writing. Being "hands on," he said, was a crucial part of how we interacted with the world. We're not just thinking, seeing beings, we're touching, feeling sensory beings. Touching things, holding things, running your hands across them, immediately triggers a whole set of things. Chairwoman of the judges, Prof Nicola Clayton, from the University of Cambridge, said the work was enthralling and written with "great passion and insight." She said: "It's a really inspiring book. I think the biggest test for me is if you read a popular science book and it's not in your area - I'm a psychologist - you read a book like that and think, 'If I had my time again perhaps I should have done a degree in that.' "He explained everything really well in an enthusiastic way and, let's face it, not many books start with a stabbing and have a chapter on chocolate," Prof Clayton told BBC News. Last year's winner featured an account of the hunt for the Higgs boson by Dr Sean Carroll, and previous winners have included Stephen Hawking and Bill Bryson. The full shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books was: Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Philip Ball (The Bodley Head) Seven Elements That Have Changed The World: Iron, Carbon, Gold, Silver, Uranium, Titanium, Silicon by John Browne (Weidenfeld & Nicolson - an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group) The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity by Pedro G. Ferreira (Little, Brown Book Group) The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson (The Bodley Head) Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World by Mark Miodownik (Viking - an imprint of Penguin Books) Gulp: Adventures of the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach (Oneworld)