Heavyweight British author Hilary Mantel is favourite to scoop this year's Orange Prize with her 10th novel Wolf Hall.
The 57-year-old, who faces competition from two debut novelists, has been shortlisted for the book prize for female authors only once before with Beyond Black in 2006 but she has never won.
Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell, a former blacksmith boy who became Henry VIII's right-hand man, has already landed the Man Booker Prize and Costa Novel Award and is 2-1 favourite to add the Orange Prize for Fiction to the list.
The two debut novelists on this year's six-strong shortlist are British author Rosie Alison, 46, and American writer Attica Locke, 36.
Ms Locke's thriller Black Water Rising was inspired by a harrowing memory of being on a boat trip with her father when she was 11 years old.
When a woman screamed for help in the darkness on another boat amidst the sound of gunshots, her father did not stop because he was worried for the safety of his family.
She has written: "Over the years my father was often haunted by his decision that night. He would bring it up from time to time, often after a couple glasses of whiskey.
"For him, it had become an almost religious parable, a tale in which one might discover the person they really are: a man who is led by cynicism or by his faith."
Alison, who spent 10 years directing TV documentaries and co-produced the movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, is shortlisted for her love story The Very Thought of You, set in Britain in the brink of the Second World War.
When The Very Thought of You was launched by its small publisher, following rejection from other publishing houses, it did not drum up much excitement - not a single review appeared in the books pages of the national newspapers.
Trinidadian-born British author Monique Roffey, 44, who is about to publish an erotic memoir detailing her sex and love life over the last 10 years, is shortlisted for the £30,000 prize for The White Woman on the Green Bicycle.
Lorrie Moore is in the running for her third novel A Gate At the Stairs and fellow US author Barbara Kingsolver has made the list with her sixth novel The Lacuna, her first novel in nine years.
The best-selling author of The Poisonwood Bible, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 1999, tells the story of Harrison William Shepherd, "a man caught between two worlds" in The Lacuna.
Small Island author Andrea Levy, who was one of 20 authors longlisted, has not made the shortlist with her new book The Long Song.
The winner, judged by author and TV producer Daisy Goodwin, rabbi, author and broadcaster Baroness Neuberger, novelist and critic Michele Roberts, journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer and British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, will be announced on June 9.
Chair of the judges Goodwin said: "This shortlist achieves the near impossible of combining literary merit with sheer readability. With a thriller, historical novels that reflect our world back to us, as well as a tragicomedy about post 9/11 America - there is something here to challenge, amuse and enthral every kind of reader."