Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has won the €100,000 Impac award for his exploration of Colombia's drug trade, The Sound of Things Falling.

One of the world's richest literary prizes, the International Impac Dublin literary award this year pitted debut novels including the American writer Patrick Flanery and the Irish novelist Donal Ryan against some of the world's biggest literary names, from Norway's Karl Ove Knausgaard to France's Goncourt-winning Marie NDiaye.

Vásquez triumphed for his third novel, a book which had already won him Spain's Alfaguara prize and which judges described as a "consummate literary thriller that resonates long after the final page".

"Through a masterly command of layered time periods, spiralling mysteries and a noir palette, it reveals how intimate lives are overshadowed by history; how the past preys on the present; and how the fate of individuals as well as countries is moulded by distant, or covert, events," they said in their citation.

Vásquez was presented with a cheque for €75,000, with his translator Anne McLean winning €25,000.

The Sound of Things Falling is set during the era of the drug lord Pablo Escobar. It sees Bogota law lecturer Antonio Yammara looking back at the life and death of his friend, an ex-pilot who is shot dead on a street corner. Vásquez told the Guardian in 2010 that he was setting out to write a novel about "how the drug trade affects somebody not involved in it; somebody who – like me – has never seen a gram of coke in his life."

Vásquez said winning was "a great honour", particularly as past winners of the award such as Javier Marías had influenced his writing. His €75,000 winnings, would be used to help with "writing books and reading books," he added. "That's the only project I have – to do these things in the best conditions possible".

The novel began "by remembering for the first time what it was like to grow up during the drug wars", Vásquez continued.

"Halfway through the novel, I realised I was doing something which hadn't been done before," he said. "We had all grown up used to the public side of the drug wars, to the images and killings ... but there wasn't a place to go to think about the private side, and I realised this is what I was doing.

"One of the questions I had about those years was how did the drug wars, with their unprecedented violence, and how did the fear, living with it and growing accustomed to it, change us? How did it change the way we behaved as fathers and sons and friends and lovers, how did it change our private behaviour? This was really very removed from the physical violence going on ... [but] my narrator discovers there's no such thing as far away violence - it all comes to you in the end."

McLean called The Sound of Things Falling "a wonderful and important novel" and expressed the hope that the win would mean "it can reach even wider readership in the English-speaking world".

The longlist for the Impac, the world's largest prize for a single novel published in English, is nominated by libraries around the world, with Mexico City branch library Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas nominating Vásquez's novel. A judging panel featuring the authors Tash Aw, Giles Foden and Catherine Dunne, and the Guardian journalist Maya Jaggi, then selected the shortlist, and their eventual winner.

Previous winners of the Impac range from Nobel laureates Orhan Pamuk and Herta Müller to Irish author Colm Tóibín and French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Vásquez is the first South American author to win the prize in its 19-year history. Eight novels in translation have taken the Impac since it was set up in 1996.