THREE giants of the literary world were laid low yesterday when they were pushed off the Man Booker Prize shortlist by lesser known novelists.

Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee, both two-times Booker winners, and Ian McEwan, who has been shortlisted four times and won once, were not good enough to be in the top six, the judges said.

There are two newcomers to the list, Zadie Smith, who was nominated for On Beauty, a homage to E. M. Forster set on the campus of an American university, and Sebastian Barry, for A Long Long Way, his third novel. His book, about a Dubliner who fights for England during the Easter Rising, “creates all sorts of interesting tensions”, John Sutherland, the chairman of the judges and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London, said.

John Banville’s The Sea, about a character who revisits a seaside town where he suffered a trauma as a child, was a remarkable achievement, Professor Sutherland said.

The judge praised Julian Barnes’s fictionalised biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edjali, a little-known solicitor who crosses paths with him in a series of incidents known as the Great Wyrley Outrages, for managing to make the twin narratives work “without bouncing the reader out of the novel”.

Ali Smith’s The Accidental was “quite a hard slog”, according to Professor Sutherland, but brilliant for its innovative style. “There are lots of orgasms,” he said. “But intellectually written orgasms. One is always aware that one is reading a novel that does new things.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was praised for its “beautifully composed” story that borders on science fiction.

The winner, announced on October 10, will receive £50,000 and, more importantly, a guaranteed sales boost.

Josephine Hart, a novelist, said that there was “regret rather than anger” that they had to exclude big names. “But it is not an award for the best body of work.”

Zadie Smith’s nomination coincides with a scathing attack by her on Britain as a “disgusting” place. Smith, who was born in London, tells New York magazine: “When I think of England now I just think about the England that I loved, and it’s just gone. It’s the way people look at each other on the train; just general stupidity, madness, vulgarity, stupid TV shows, aspirational a******s, money everywhere.

“It’s just a disgusting place, it’s terrifying. Maybe I’m just getting old.”

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The Sea by John Banville

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