TOMORROW sees the publication of the Granta Best of the Young British Novelists list for 2003. This list has been described as “long-awaited”, but how long have you been waiting? Me neither, and for the same reason as you: because I saw nothing to smile about in the morose bunch of humourless word-murderers and plot-fakers who fleshed out the previous two lists in 1983 and 1993.

No British writer has produced a world-class novel in 25 years, maybe 40 years. We are worse at writing novels than we are at football and cricket, but we are still the best in the world at giving ourselves prizes. The Booker Prize has been derided as the Commonwealth Games of fiction, and the Granta list is just the depressing squad of flabby pavement-pounders we send out to get whupped by a Canadian.

To say that Philip Kerr or Hanif Kureishi were among the best British novelists of 1993 was like observing that Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards was among the best British ski-jumpers. And to be named in the new crop of the best 15 or so novelists of today is as much of an accolade as to be called one of the best 15 British tennis players. It is hardly surprising that a nation which believes that Louis de Bernières, Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks are literary novelists gets so excited every June about the big service game of Greg Rusedski.

Yup, the Best of Young British Novelists for 2003 looks like being the damp squib it always is, with Philip Hensher, Sara Waters, Toby Litt, Zadie Smith, Dreary McYawn et al staring at you from tomorrow’s Observer. Or so I thought.

But in the past few minutes I received a fax from Granta. Angry about the vain prejudice that this article appears to show as it approaches the halfway point, they have sent me a preview of the names on this year’s roster and it seems I was wrong. They have looked a little towards the market and made some selections based on bookshop popularity. The refreshing collection of names suggests there is hope for the British novel after all.

Pamela Stephenson

Billy was a bestseller last year for this woman who combines the wit of a Smollett with the human feeling of a Plath and the post-operative teeth of an Amis. In The Spectator, Peter Ackroyd declared: “Stephenson writes with a psychological intensity unseen since Eliot and Gissing. The Big Yin is a comic grotesque fit to stand alongside Magwitch, Gargantua, even Roderick Spode.”

Alan Titchmarsh

This green-fingered Flaubert’s most recent novel, Trowel and Error, was championed by Germaine Greer on The Late Review back in August. “Not only is the title worthy of comparison with anything written in the vernacular since Langland,” she said, “but the predominantly female character of his audience echoes the readerly demographic manifest at the birth of the genre.”

Jamie Oliver

Oliver is one of the New London Realists and a beacon to such smaller fry as Will Self and Martin Amis. His appreciation of the language of the street is worthy of a Genet or a Welsh and, as Jason Cowley wrote in the New Statesman: “The hard glint of his timeless prose sparkles no less fiercely than that of my old friend Jim Ballard, who I’ve met on several occasions.”

Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine

Not since George and Weedon Grossmith has a work of collaborative humour had the social influence of this well-born duo’s What Not To Wear, which was published in hardback last autumn. “At last,” cried James Woods in The Guardian, “neo-Augustan satirists who can dress!”