Teacher who went on writing course battles J M Coetzee for Booker prize

First-timers and a two-time winner are among those up for the book world’s most famous prize. Here’s our handy primer…

A former primary school teacher who toiled at his first novel in his spare time after attending a writing course has been nominated for a Man Booker Prize, but he must compete against J M Coetzee who has won two Bookers.

Wyl Menmuir from Cornwall is on a longlist full of surprises, after he spent three years working on The Many. He is one of four newcomers who are testing the might of Deborah Levy, who was nominated once before, former judge A L Kennedy and Coetzee, the first person to win the prize twice, in 1983 and 1999.

Six of the 13 nominees are women, and six are from the UK following a change of rules in 2013, which opened the prize up to all novels originally written in English.

There were several surprise exclusions – including Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Rose Tremain.

British nominees include Kennedy, for Serious Sweet, Levy for Hot Milk, and Ian McGuire for The North Water. Graeme Macrae Burnet is nominated for His Bloody Project, and David Szalay, born in Canada but living in Britain, for All That Man Is.

Other nominees include Paul Beatty for The Sellout, David Means for Hystopia, Ottessa Moshfegh for Eileen, Virginia Reeves for Work Like Any Other, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton and Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

Judges said the list was a triumph for serious literature at a time when it was harder for new authors to gain attention amid the “din of social media” and “shrinking shelf space”.

Menmuir said the news of his nomination had been “surreal”, and so unexpected that he had ignored the call from his publisher while having coffee with his grandmother. “It’s totally crazy,” he said. “I’m really still in the stage of shock.”

The shortlist of six will be announced on September 13, and the winner on October 25.

Forget the snubs on this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist (Julian Barnes, Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain, Dave Eggers and Lionel Shriver all failed to make the cut), because the most valuable service a book award can do for the reading public is to catapult unfairly overlooked writers from the fringes and into the limelight. And this year’s longlist – aglitter with hidden gems – has taken that mission seriously. Four of the 13 titles are first novels, and all but two of the authors (the exceptions being JM Coetzee and Deborah Levy) have never been longlisted before. The list is diplomatically weighted between American and British writers, and between men and women (roughly half and half in both cases), but the choices are far from cautious. Amid the diverse fictional words, you will find a murder mystery, a counter-factual history of the Vietnam War, the tale of an electrician in rural Alabama, a novel set in the hold of a 19th-century whaling ship, and another set entirely in a hospital room. The shortlist will be announced on September 13; the winner on October 25.