Man Booker shortlist 2015: is this the most diverse lineup ever?

So a panel that, as Booker tradition requires, contains three middle-aged white males – chairman Michael Wood, John Burnside and Sam Leith – have come up with a shortlist that includes only one novelist who mirrors them. Like Edward St Aubyn in 2006 and Will Self in 2012, Tom McCarthy is the last MAWM left standing; he is also the sole mid-career author and previous shortlistee. After a brutal cull of eminent entrants, past winners among them, in their 40s, 50s and 60s at the longlist and shortlist stages, there is a striking disparity in experience between Anne Tyler, shortlisted for her 20th and possibly last book, and the remaining four finalists with eight novels between them.

Whatever the explanation of this slaughter of the seasoned – did the old guard all underperform, or was there a bias towards new faces and fiction? – the result could well be, in terms of ethnicity and age-range at least, the most diverse shortlist ever. Marlon James is the Booker’s first Jamaican shortlistee and would be the first African-Caribbean winner. Chigozie Obioma, 28 (with Eleanor Catton, the joint youngest finalist), would be the first Nigerian winner since Ben Okri in 1991 and joins another short list: in a prize that has been scandalously reluctant to appoint non-white judges – Ellah Wakatama Allfrey this year appears to be only the fourth – just four black authors from sub-Saharan Africa have reached this stage before him.

Derby-born Sunjeev Sahota would be the first UK-native British winner from any ethnic minority (VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, in contrast, were born abroad), and the first maths graduate to triumph since JM Coetzee. The short-odds favourite Hanya Yanagihara would be the first author of east Asian heritage to win since Kazuo Ishiguro in 1989, and she or Tyler would of course be the first American winner (as a magazine journalist, she would arguably be also the first winner with a “real”, non-literary job since Roddy Doyle, unless Arundhati Roy’s aerobics teaching qualifies). At 73, Tyler would probably be the venerable award’s oldest winner, as even the Dumbledore-esque William Golding was a mere 69 when he saw off a furious Anthony Burgess in 1980.

However, the shortlist’s rainbow-like appearance is somewhat deceptive, since (as Philip Hensher noted on Twitter, grumpily adding “told you so”) “four out of six of Booker shortlist American or America-residing novelists” – James and Obioma both have US academic posts, joining the two women – while the other pair are Brits. And if you take away the 70s Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings and the 90s Nigeria of The Fishermen, plus The Year of the Runaways’ Indian flashbacks, what’s left suddenly looks distinctly narrow in focus and familiar: a 200-mile stretch of the US east coast (Tyler’s Baltimore, Yanagihara’s New York) and two cities in England’s eastern half (McCarthy’s London, Sahota’s Sheffield) linked by 180 miles of the M1.

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