A year after Richard Flanagan's win with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, no Australian novelists made it onto the longlist for the Man Booker Prize - the first step towards winning the £50,000 prize in October.
In the second year that the most prestigious international fiction prize was opened to American writers, five appear on the longlist of 13, enough to confirm the fears that former Commonwealth writers would be edged out.
On the longlist are Bill Clegg (US) for Did You Ever Have a Family, Anne Enright (Ireland) for The Green Road, Marlon James (Jamaica) for A Brief History of Seven Killings, Laila Lalami (US) for The Moor's Account, Tom McCarthy (UK) for Satin Island, Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) for The Fishermen, Andrew O'Hagan (UK) for The Illuminations, Marilynne Robinson (US) for Lila, Anuradha Roy (India) for Sleeping on Jupiter, Sunjeev Sahota (UK) for The Year of the Runaways, Anna Smaill (New Zealand) for The Chimes, Anne Tyler (US) for A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus) and Hanya Yanagihara (US) for A Little Life.
Peter Carey, who has won two Bookers for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) was widely expected at least to be longlisted for Amnesia, his wild vision of a young woman resembling Julian Assange who hacks into US prison security; however, his fictional political conspiracy reaching back to the dismissal of the Whitlam government might not have resonated with the British judges, Michael Wood, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne.
Despite the absence of Australians, the judges said they were struck by the international spectrum of the novels, with the longlist featuring three British writers, five US writers and one each from the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, India, Nigeria and Jamaica. Marlon James, who lives in Minneapolis, is the first Jamaican-born author to be nominated for the prize. Laila Lalami, now based in Santa Monica but born in Rabat, is the first Moroccan-born.
Anne Enright is the only former winner in the running. The Irish writer won the prize in 2007 with The Gathering. Tom McCarthy was shortlisted in 2010 for C and Andrew O'Hagan in 1999 for Our Fathers; he was also longlisted for Be Near Me in 2006). Marilynne Robinson has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011 and 2013. Three debut novelists are on the list: Bill Clegg, Chigozie Obioma and Anna Smaill.
The chairman of the judges, Michael Wood, said: "We had a great time choosing this list. Discussions weren't always peaceful, but they were always very friendly. We were lucky in our companions and the submissions were extraordinary. The longlist could have been twice as long, but we're more than happy with our final choice.
"The range of different performances and forms of these novels is amazing. All of them do something exciting with the language they have chosen to use."
The shortlist will be announced on September 15 and the winner on October 13.
