Three Irish authors have been shortlisted for the Whitbread prize. Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes and John Banville's The Untouchable are in the Novel Award category, which also includes Ian McEwan, Jim Crace and Geoff Nicholson. Anne Haverty has been shortlisted in the new novel category for One Day as a Tiger.
In a joint statement, the novel prize judges criticised "vigorous but comparatively artless `slice of life' novels." They said: "Some highly readable books stayed off the shortlist because they lacked the sheer aspiration of those that rose to the surface, but we were sorry to see them go."
Novelist Fay Weldon said she and her fellow judges, Findlay Caldwell, the marketing director of book chain Dillons, and Stephen Moss, literary editor of the Guardian, realised they had an all-male shortlist in the Novel Award category only when it was complete. She added: "We are judging books, not writers here. No shortlist is easy but there were some obvious front runners this year. These five books were the ones that were terribly difficult to leave off a shortlist."