Two Americans make the Man Booker Prize shortlist

American novelists Josh Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler are on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. 2014 marks the first year that Americans have been eligible for the $85,000 award.

The full list:

Joshua Ferris (U.S.), “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour”
Richard Flanagan (Australia), “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”
Karen Joy Fowler (U.S.), “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves”
Howard Jacobson (Britain), “J”
Neel Mukherjee (Britain), “The Lives of Others”
Ali Smith (Britain), “How to be Both”

In England, where oddsmakers take bets on the Man Booker race, Jacobson is likely to take the lead. He won in 2010 for his novel “The Finkler Question.”

Smith may also be a favorite: She has been shortlisted twice before, in 2001 and 2005.

Two notable authors that didn’t make the cut are Richard Powers, a winner of the U.S.’s National Book Award, and David Mitchell, who has been three times longlisted and twice shortlisted for the Man Booker, but hasn’t won.

Until this year, the prestigious annual fiction prize has been awarded to authors from British Commonwealth nations.

Previous winners include Hilary Mantel, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee, Anne Enright, John Banville, Julian Barnes, Aravind Adiga, Yann Martel and Peter Carey. In 2013, debut author Eleanor Catton won with “The Luminaries,” the longest novel ever to win the award.

The Man Booker Prize will be presented at a televised London gala on Oct. 14.

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