FIVE Nobel prize-winners were among 18 authors short- listed yesterday for the first international version of the Man Booker prize for fiction, which is expected to become one of the most eminent events in the literary calendar.

Nobel laureates from the US, Colombia, Germany, Egypt and Japan — Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Naguib Mahfouz and Kenzaburo Oe — were nominated, with writers from 13 countries.

But acclaimed authors such as Sir V. S. Naipaul, who in 2001 became the first British author to win the Nobel prize since William Golding in 1983, and J. M. Coetzee, the South African who won the Booker in 1983 and 1999 and the Nobel in 2003, were absent.

Worth £60,000, the Man Booker International Prize will be awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language. It can be presented to an author of any nationality and differs from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it recognises a body of work rather than a single volume.

The shortlist reflected that it takes decades of experience to fine-tune the craft of writing novels. With Bellow in his 89th year and Mahfouz in his 93rd, the youngest author on the list was Ian McEwan, 56, who won the Booker in 1998.

Other British contenders include Doris Lessing, 85, best known for The Grass is Singing, and Muriel Spark, 87, who in 1997 donated £10,000 to the Edinburgh school which she attended for 12 years and on which she based her classic 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The judges’ chairman, John Carey, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, who also chaired the Booker Prize in 1982 and in 2003, said: “For us, these are 18 authors who combine uniqueness and universality and remind us irresistibly of the joy of reading.”

He noted that more than half of the authors on the shortlist are in translation, including from Hebrew and Japanese: “This was a major consideration for us. We hope this will be a spur to publishers to publish more work in translation and to keep in print work already available.”

Many experts claim that foreign literature is generally ignored in Britain. In 1997 only 2 per cent of books published in Britain were translations. Today 3 per cent of the books published in Britain are translations.

Professor Carey said: “We are too insular. There are wonderful things, but a lot of readers are cut off from them. Think of the history of novels — Balzac, Zola . . . we think they’re English writers in a way. It’s the enormous dominance of English. It means we are cut off from other countries.”

The judging panel includes the writer, novelist and editor Alberto Manguel, and the writer and academic Azar Nafisi.

Professor Carey described the judging session as particularly passionate, with occasional angry exchanges.

The judges drew up an initial list of 100 names from 43 countries. Although the prize may recognise someone’s life’s work, they were also considering authors whose single book had made a dramatic impact on the course of literature. Although some judges of previous prizes have admitted to not bothering to read beyond the first few chapters of some of the books under consideration, Professor Carey said that they each read several books by the individual authors. Of the omissions — who also included Salman Rushdie even though Midnight’s Children was judged “the Booker of Bookers” in 1993 — Professor Carey said: “We’re very aware of the giants who are missing. We simply followed our own tastes.”

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