Margaret Atwood is among eighteen authors from thirteen countries who have made it on to a list of contenders for the first Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement.

The other authors on the short list for the new prize include Saul Bellow, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, Ismail Kadare, Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Naguib Mahfouz, Tomas Eloy Martinez, Kenzaburo Oe, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, Antonio Tabucchi, John Updike and A. B. Yehoshua.

The new prize, worth around $150,000 (Canadian), will be awarded every two years and is open to living authors of all nationalities whose work has been either written or translated widely into English.

It differs from the Man Booker prize for fiction in that it highlights one writer's continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage. The fiction prize is only open to writers from Britain, Ireland and Commonwealth countries.