Artist Tracey Emin has been honoured with the South Bank Sky Arts Awards outstanding achievement prize.
Emin, who collected her award from Frank Skinner at the London ceremony, said she was “really overwhelmed”.
Tracy was born in Croydon to a English mother and Turkish Cypriot father and brought up in Margate.
The 49-year-old artist has been best known for eye-opening works including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, the tent embroidered with names that was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004, and My Bed, an installation of her unmade dirty bed including objects such as used condoms, discarded tampon applicators and blood-spotted underwear.
Arctic Monkeys beat David Bowie to win the pop music prize, while acclaimed ITV crime series Broadchurch triumphed over the BBC’s Top of the Lake and The Fall to win TV drama.
British film The Selfish Giant won the film award.
It beat Hanif Kureishi’s Le Week-End, starring Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan, and Steve Coogan’s Oscar-nominated Philomena.
Coogan was also nominated in the comedy category for Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa, alongside Sky Arts’ series Psychobitches.
But both lost out to surprise winner Bridget Christie, who won the prize for her stand-up show A Bic for Her.
Backstage at London’s Dorchester Hotel, Christie was genuinely surprised, and said she would place her award – designed by Sir Peter Blake – “on a little windowsill behind a mannequin”.
“They put all the cameras on Psychobitches and everyone on my table said ‘oh never mind, it doesn’t matter’.
“I dealt with not winning and then I quickly had to deal with winning,” said the comedian.
She added that the success of her show came after a lull in her work when it “hadn’t been going so well”.
Emin, 50, is no stranger to collecting accolades after a prominent art career spanning more than two decades.
“It’s not about me, it’s about art, it’s about culture,” she said after receiving her achievement award.
“I’m totally focused on what I’m doing at the moment and am very happy,” said the artist, who has recently bought a home in Miami.
Emin revealed that her new objectives are to pass her driving test in the US and learn how to speak French, joking that the second ambition is “never going to happen”.