Irish debut author Mark O’Connell has won the Wellcome book prize for his exploration of transhumanism, a movement that seeks to use technology to solve “the modest problem of death”, as O’Connell puts it.

To Be a Machine won the £30,000 award, which goes to the best work of fiction or non-fiction to “illuminate the many ways that health and medicine touch our lives”, at a ceremony in London on Monday night. O’Connell’s book saw off competition that included the Nigerian author Ayòbámi Adébáyò, nominated for Stay With Me, a novel about sickle cell disease, and Sigrid Rausing’s memoir about the impact of addiction on her family, Mayhem.

Chair of judges Edmund de Waal called To Be a Machine a “passionate, entertaining and cogent examination of those who would choose to live for ever”.

To Be a Machine sees the 38-year-old O’Connell meet with those working to conquer mortality through technology – from the self-proclaimed cyborgs who insert tech implants beneath their skin, to the developers trying to translate human minds into code. Exploring the beliefs and work of several high-profile transhumanists, including PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, inventor Elon Musk and Google’s head of engineering Ray Kurzweil, O’Connell also examines the philosophy and science behind the movement, as well as the opportunities and concerns it may create in the future.

“What are my chances, would you say, of living to 1,000?” the author asks gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. “I would say perhaps a little better than fifty-fifty,” de Grey replies. “It’s very much dependent on the level of funding.”

De Waal said: “Mark O’Connell brilliantly examines issues of technology and singularity. In doing so he brings into focus timely issues about mortality, what it might mean to be a machine and what it truly means to be human. It is also unequivocally readable, in that what it does is address hugely complicated areas of new science to do with AI and ethics, simultaneously. That’s very remarkable, to be able to traverse bits of cutting-edge scientific research and make something that is funny, engaged, cogent and lucid, all at the same time.”

O’Connell, a journalist, essayist and literary critic, “hasn’t got multiple PhDs in this area,” said de Waal. “What he does have, which is critical, is an absolutely ferocious, forensic, enquiring mind. He drills down into what people are saying and gets them to reveal all kinds of complicated and ambiguous aspects to do with their desires and their aspirations. He looks at scientific discoveries through the messiness of human desire. That’s really difficult to do.”

Previous winners of the Wellcome prize include Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and Marion Coutts’s The Iceberg.