Julian Barnes was confirmed as the favourite to win the Man Booker literary prize today after his main heavyweight rivals were left off the shortlist.

The six authors shortlisted are Zadie Smith, Ali Smith, John Banville, Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry and Kazuo Ishiguro.

But the announcement this afternoon will come as a disappointment to several authors with distinguished literary pedigrees.

This year's longlist included four former Booker winners, including the 2003 Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, who won the Booker with Disgrace in 1999, Ian McEwan, who won for Amsterdam in 1998 and Salman Rushdie who won with Midnight's Children in 1981.

Other established names included Rachel Cusk, whose In The Fold looks at deception within a marriage, and Hilary Mantel, in whose Beyond Black a medium passes on messages from dead people's ancestors.

None of these progressed beyond the shortlist, leaving Ishiguro, whose The Remains of the Day took the Booker prize in 1989, as the only former winner to make it through to the final round. His Never Let Me Go is a sinister story about children being bred for experiments.

Barnes's shortlised novel, Arthur & George, an investigation of a grisly true crime, is joined by John Banville's The Sea, in which an art historian confronts a recent loss and trauma; Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way, in which a teenager leaves home in 1914 to fight for the Allies; Ali Smith's The Accidental, in which a stranger turns up at a family's Norfolk holiday home; and Zadie Smith's third book, On Beauty, a social comedy about cross-generational misunderstanding.

The judging panel is led by John Sutherland, professor of modern English as University College London, and includes Josephine Hart, the novelist, broadcaster and producer, and Lindsay Duguid, the fiction editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Mr Sutherland said this year’s long list had been unusually good and some excellent books had narrowly missed the cut. He told a press conference that the judges felt the selection of the shortlist was an unusually difficult process this year, with sufficient quality for two distinguished lists.

"The strength of the year’s competition can be measured by the fact that three good books by previous Man Booker winners were finally not selected," he said.

"This shortlist, we believe, witnesses to the remarkable quality of the current state of fiction. We look forward to the final round."

Ladbrokes the bookmakers was this morning offering odds of 4:1 on Barnes, compared to 12:1 for Ali Smith, 16:1 for Banville, Barry and Zadie Smith, and 20:1 for an unfancied Ishiguro.

Each of the six writers on the shortlist receives £2,500, while the eventual winner goes on to receive a cheque for £50,000. The winner will be announced at an awards dinner at Guildhall on October 10 which will be broadcast live on BBC Two.

Last year's prize was won by Alan Hollinghurst for The Line Of Beauty, described by the judges as a brilliantly written book that "gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite 80s".

There were also three first novels on the longlist: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw and This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, a 45-year-old television producer from London, whose historical novel about Charles Darwin won him comparisons with Coetzee.

Shortlist:

John Banville, The Sea

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Ali Smith, The Accidental

Zadie Smith, On Beauty.

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