The Man Booker Prize judges have revealed the details of the 2016 longlist, the Guardian reports.

Among the thirteen novels selected, six are by women, and seven are by men. In addition, five of the writers are American, six British, one Canadian, and one South African.

“The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high,” said the chair of judges, Amanda Foreman, in a statement. “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 list includes J.M. Coetzee, (The Schooldays of Jesus), Deborah Levy (Hot Milk), A.L. Kennedy (Serious Sweet), Elizabeth Strout (My Name is Lucy Barton), Graeme Macrae Burnet (His Bloody Project), Paul Beatty (The Sellout), David Means (Hystopia), Wyl Menmuir (The Many), Ottessa Moshfegh (Eileen), Virginia Reeves (Work Like Any Other), David Szalay (All That Man Is), Ian McGuire (The North Water), and Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing).

This is the third year that the award has permitted American authors to compete. “What we have to avoid is homogeneity,” Foreman added. “These two cultures [American and British] are alive, but they are not the same. They have a different literary and historical heritage which informs them and it is really important that we don’t make literary soup out of them.”

The judges for the £50,000 prize include Foreman, Jon Day, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Harsent, and Olivia Williams. They will announce the shortlist on September 13 and the winner on October 25.

Related reading: In an op-ed for the Guardian, June Eric Udorie laments the lack of diversity among the Man Booker prize longlist selections: “Only three writers on the 13-strong list were people of colour: Madeleine Thien, Paul Beatty, and Ottessa Moshfegh. The fact that all three of them are based in North America is a further disappointment, confirming the fears of many that allowing entries from the US would sideline BAME [Black, Asian, and minority ethnic] writers from the UK.”

Image Credit: Man Booker Prize.