AS Byatt and JM Coetzee will battle it out for this year's Man Booker Prize, but several other former winners were dealt an embarrassing snub yesterday when the judges were less than complimentary about their latest literary endeavours.


Judges for the Man Booker Prize (Lt-Rt) John Mullan, Lucasta Miller, James Naughtie, Sue Perkins, and Michael Prodger pose with the six shortlisted novels

Nine previous Booker winners submitted entries for the award, hoping to recapture former glories. However, only Byatt and Coetzee feature in the shortlist and the judges made no bones about the quality of the rest.

James Naughtie, the presenter of Radio 4's Today programme and chair of the judging panel, said: "Just because you're a former winner of the prize doesn't mean you can't write a bad book - and we certainly found that along the way." Of the 132 books considered for the prize this year "there were some terrible novels".

Mr Naughtie was too polite to name names, but Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Penelope Lively, John Banville, Anita Brookner, Barry Unsworth and last year's winner, Aravind Ardiga, all submitted novels that failed even to make the longlist.

A source connected to the award said that their efforts ranged "from the good to the merely average, with one downright stinker".

Sue Perkins, one of the judges, said: "Some very significant big hitters did not make the list. We were very clear on not picking books on the author's illustrious pedigree, but on the merits of the novel. That's why some [previous winners] are here and some are not."

The runaway favourite this year is Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, a historical novel set in the court of Henry VIII. Coetzee will score the first Booker hat-trick if he wins with Summertime, a fictionalised biography which takes his own imagined death as its subject matter. He won in 1983 with Life and Times of Michael K and in 1999 with Disgrace. Byatt, who won in 1990 with Possession, is shortlisted for The Children's Book, a sprawling family saga.

The other contenders are The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds.

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