Mantel's New Piece Chasing Second Booker Prize

The shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize has been unveiled - with previous winner Hilary Mantel among the six contenders.

Mantel, 60, won the £50,000 prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall, the first book in her fictional trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, who rose to power in the court of Henry VIII.

If she scoops the title again with her follow-up, Bring Up The Bodies, she will become the first British writer to have won the Man Booker Prize For Fiction twice.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, a novel which was originally rejected by traditional publishers, has also been shortlisted.

Set on the French Riviera over a single week, it hit the shelves after being published by a small company which uses a subscription method to bring out many of its books.

Novelist and journalist Will Self is shortlisted for the first time for Umbrella, a novel which has no chapters and few paragraph breaks, which judges described as both "moving and draining".

"Those who stick with it will find it much less difficult than it first seems," they said of the book, which is set across an entire century.

Two of the books on the list are debut novels - 53-year-old Indian performance poet, songwriter and guitarist Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis and Manchester-born Alison Moore's The Lighthouse.

Narcopolis, which judges praised for its "perfume prose", is set in Bombay in the 1970s.

The Lighthouse is the story of a middle-aged, recently separated man, who crosses the Channel by ferry after the failure of his marriage.

The sixth book is The Garden Of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, about the survivor of a Second World War Japanese prison camp. It is one of three books on the shortlist from small, independent publishers.

Dan Stevens, who plays Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey and is one of the judges, used an e-book reader to plough through some of the 145 titles on the longlist while filming the drama.

The 29-year-old joked that his electronic device was "easier to secrete into a white tie".

Bookmaker Ladbrokes made Mantel, followed by Self, the favourite to win the prize.

The winner, who traditionally benefits from a huge surge in sales, will be unveiled at a ceremony in London's Guildhall on Tuesday, October 16.

Last year's winner, The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes, has sold more than 300,000 print editions in the UK.