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| Toibin and Crace lead Booker shortlist | Toibin and Crace lead Booker shortlist |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Previous nominees Jim Crace and Colm Toibin are among the writers to make this year's Man Booker shortlist. | Previous nominees Jim Crace and Colm Toibin are among the writers to make this year's Man Booker shortlist. |
| Eleanor Catton, 27, is the youngest to make the cut with her book The Luminaries, out in September. | Eleanor Catton, 27, is the youngest to make the cut with her book The Luminaries, out in September. |
| Crace's inclusion follows his announcement in February that Harvest was likely to be his last novel. He is the oldest author on the list at 67. | Crace's inclusion follows his announcement in February that Harvest was likely to be his last novel. He is the oldest author on the list at 67. |
| Toibin is shortlisted for The Testament Of Mary. Ruth Ozeki, Jhumpha Lahiri and NoViolet Bulawayo are also nominated. | |
| Robert Macfarlane, chair of the judges, said the shortlist was "instantly striking" because of its "global range". | |
| "It shows the English language novel to be a form of world literature," he added. | |
| The list is made up for four women and two men. | |
| NoViolet Bulawayo We Need New Names is about a Zimbabwean girl coming of age in the US; while Lahiri's The Lowland tells the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, brought up in Calcutta in the late 1960s. | |
| Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being tells the story of a diary washed ashore inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox and the profound effect it has on the woman who discovers it. | |
| Catton's The Luminaries is a ghostly tale set in Victorian New Zealand. | |
| Crace was previously shortlisted in 1997 for Quarantine, while Toibin has appeared twice before - for The Blackwater Lightship in 1999 and in 2004 with The Master. | |
| Testament of Mary could become the shortest-ever winner - the book has just 104 pages. | |
| The shortest winning novel in the history of the prize was Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, at 132 pages, in 1979. Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending were just slightly longer. | |
| In terms of length of eligible books, the rules of the prize simply state that the judges must be of the opinion that a book is a unified and substantial work. | |
| The six shortlisted writers are each awarded £2,500 and presented with a hand-bound edition of their book. The winner will receive a further £50,000. |