Five British authors among the contenders for the 2016 Man Booker Prize

The 13 authors are in the running for the covetable award and £50,000 prize for fiction.

The longlist for the £50,000 Man Booker Prize has been announced (27 July) and UK authors have fared well with five nominated amongst the 13 novelists selected in the Man Booker Dozen.

The panel of judges Amanda Foreman (Chair); Jon Day; Abdulrazak Gurnah; David Harsent and Olivia Williams selected the list from a 155 fiction books with writers from Canada, South Africa and the US also joining the UK nominations.

First awarded in 1969, the prize is open to authors of any nationality as long as they have written in English and been published in the UK.

If J.M Coetzee wins this year it will be his third Man Booker Prize

This year, the South-African/Australian novelist JM Coetzee will be eyeing up his third Booker prize with his allegorical novel The Schooldays of Jesus.

His first accolade came in 1983 when he won with Life & Times of Michael K, he then took the prize home again in 1999 with Disgrace which made him the first author to win twice.

Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Jonathan Cape)

Ottessa Moshfegh's novel Eileen has been nominated in the longlist for the Man Booker Prize for fiction. Krystal Griffiths

On the other hand there are four debut novelists also in the running; Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves, Hystopia by David Means and The Many by Wyl Menmuir that hope to take home the cash prize and winning title.

Author Deborah Levy returns to the list after being shortlisted for the prize in 2012 for Swimming Home, whilst AL Kennedy takes an alternative role after sitting as a judge in 1996, when Last Orders won the prize for Graham Swift.

"This is a very exciting year" said Chair of the 2016 judges, Amanda Foreman. "The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be...From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished."

The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 13 September, with those authors receiving £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. On Tuesday 25 October, the winner will be revealed at a black-tie event in London's Guildhall that will be broadcast by the BBC where the author will receive another £50,000 prize and can usually expect to achieve international fame with such an achievement.

The 2016 full longlist:

Paul Beatty (US) - The Sellout (Oneworld)