Irish writers figure large as contenders for prestigious Whitbread prize are shortlisted

IRISH writers have made their presence felt as the contenders for this year's Whitbread prize are announced in London today.

Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane and Mary Morrissy are among the writers competing in the several categories, the respective winners of which will then go to compete for the overall Whitbread Book of the Year Award. A fourth Irish writer is competing in spirit alone, as one of the year's two biographies of Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, has also been nominated.

Several times in the past the controversy and outraged debate instigated by apparently wayward Booker judges have been put right by the less capricious Whitbread panel. Though still less prestigious than the £20,000 Booker prize, which is awarded annually to fiction, the Whitbread prize offers more money to the overall winner and, with its multiple categories, enjoys far greater flexibility. And, ultimately, it often proves far more satisfying to readers and critics, never mind publishers as well.

Previously the award was divided into five categories: best novel, poetry, biographer, best first novel and the now defunct best children's book sections. Ireland's 1995 Nobel Laureate and a former Whitbread poetry winner, Seamus Heaney, looks a strong favourite to take the poetry section with his collection, The Spirit Level. Also nominated in this category are Christopher Reid for Expanded Universes, Pauline Stainer for The Wound dresser's Dream, Alice Oswald's intriguingly entitled collection The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile and U.A. Fanthorpe's Safe as Houses. Heabey previously won the prize for the Haw Lantern Collection in 1988.

This year's Booker contender and the only first time novelist on that list, poet and academic Seamus Deane has been nominated for his powerful and lyrically written Reading in the Dark, which has emerged as one of the major novels of 1996. Also shortlisted is another Irish writer, Mary Morrissy, who has already been widely acclaimed in the United States with Mother of Pearl. Overlooked by Booker and probably the most outstanding omission from that list, this is a beautifully written and accomplished performance.

And while Deane should easily hold off the challenge of John Lanchester's pretentiously clever if amusing yarn, The Debt to Pleasure, and short story writer Georgina Hammick who has been short listed for the Arizona Game, Morrissy's shortlisting is a valuable and deserved endorsement of a compelling story concerning a woman determined at all costs toe have a child.

The life and work of the 1969 Irish Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett dominates take biography section. James Knowlson's meticulously researched study, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, should hold off Rosemary Ashton's George Eliot: A Life, and the two other more historically based contenders, Flora Fraser's The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline and Diarmuid Mac Culloch's scholarly study of the life of Thomas Cranmer. The most obvious omission here is critic Hermione Lee's critically acclaimed and textually based Virginia Woolf; a Life.

The largest shortlist, that for the novel award, gathers this year's Booker winner Graham Swift's extremely popular Last Orders, together with another English novel which did very well critically, Beryl Bainbridge's morality play of sorts Every Man for Himself Also included on the shortlist is Patrick McGrath's Asylum, a predictable novel from a writer who has specialised in psychological tension but nevertheless one of the most elegantly written books published anywhere this year.

It could prove a dark horse, if purely on the quality of McGrath's prose. An extremely interesting inclusion is the controversial Cocaine Nights, an even more surreal morality play from one of Britain's most consistently disturbing and imaginative writers, J.G. Ballard. Neil Bartlett's Mr Clive and Mr Page, and Fay Weldon's Worse Fears would appear to be the two outsiders, somewhat outclassed by the other four.

Swift to win certainly, but he faces some competition from Bainbridge's many supporters as well as McGrath's, while Ballard as ever remains a dangerous maverick. When the prizes are announced in mid January Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane should be category winners, while. Knowlson looks a strong overall winner - providing, of course, that - Beckett's life can compete with the emotive force of Deane's book.