Ten "ambitious, resonant" titles are named today to fight the first round of the £10,000 Guardian First Book Award, which is dedicated to spotting and advancing new writing talent.

Authors on this year's longlist range from Catherine O'Flynn, brought up in her parents' Birmingham sweet shop, to Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu.

Themes range from the politically revelatory to the wildly surrealist. The 10 include two of the year's most intriguing titles - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, and A Guinea Pig's History of Biology - one of which is seriously meant.

This has been a good year for first-time writers, with four on the Man Booker longlist. Of the Guardian longlist, Catherine O'Flynn's novel What Was Lost is on the Man Booker list and was longlisted earlier for the Orange prize.

Daljit Nagra's poem collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! is shortlisted for the Forward best poetry collection award. And Rajiv Chandrasekaran's expose Imperial Life in the Emerald City scooped this year's Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize.

Last night the chair of judges, Claire Armitstead, literary editor of the Guardian, said: "It was incredibly hard to whittle the fiction for this list down to just five titles. Books of reportage on international affairs have also been very strong."

The Guardian prize rewards the best new writing from all genres and allows readers' groups to play a part in deciding the result. This year the groups are based in Waterstone's stores. Stuart Broom, of Waterstone's, represents them as a judge.

The other judges are: Katharine Viner, features editor of the Guardian; authors Kamila Shamsie and Maggie O'Farrell; the presenter and journalist Mariella Frostrup; Philippe Sands, the QC and author; and the journalist and author Simon Jenkins.