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Ned Beauman is in the running for this year’s Guardian First Book Award 2010, the only male author in a shortlist of five.
Beauman’s Boxer, Beetle (Sceptre) is one of three novels and two non-fiction titles up for the £10,000 prize, which is announced on 1st December.
The list also comprises: Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, by Maile Chapman (Jonathan Cape); Black Mamba Boy, by Nadifa Mohamed (HarperCollins); Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz (Portobello Books); and Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper by Alexandra Harris (Thames & Hudson).
Chair of judges, Claire Armitstead, said "This brilliant shortlist reflects one of the year's big literary themes - how to tell stories in our new era. Do you go back, like Nadifa Mohamed, to traditional forms of storytelling, or forwards, like Ned Beauman, into bravura post-modern flights of imagination? Is it possible, like Maile Chapman, to make old women interesting? "
"How does one find forms capable of challenging the orthodoxies of 20th century art, as Alexandra Harris does in Romantic Moderns, or interrogate basic societal assumptions, as Kathryn Schulz does in Being Wrong.
"Each of these books provides its own very different answer, and it is thrilling that our judges and the Waterstone's reading groups have chosen five such rich and challenging works."
The shortlist was decided by a celebrity judging panel, along with five Waterstone’s reading groups around the UK.