The Man Booker Prize [2] judges announced today the finalists for the 2009 award, selected from a longlist [3] of thirteen. Six writers now have less than a month to wait to see who of them will receive the fifty-thousand-pound prize (a little over eighty thousand dollars), given for a novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.

The shortlisted titles are:

The Children's Book (Chatto and Windus) by A. S. Byatt [4]

Summertime (Harvill Secker) by J. M. Coetzee [5]

The Quickening Maze (Jonathan Cape) by Adam Fould

Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) by Hilary Mantel

The Glass Room (Little, Brown) by Simon Mawer

The Little Stranger (Virago) by Sarah Waters 

For readers interested in sampling the selected texts, audio excerpts [6] from the finalists' books, as well as interviews [7] with the writers, are available on the prize Web site. The site is also hosting a virtual debate [8] about the shortlisted books.

This year's judges are critic Lucasta Miller, journalist John Mullan, broadcaster James Naughtie, comedian Sue Perkins, and Sunday Telegraph literary editor Michael Prodger. They will reveal the winner on October 6.