As if to make up for the disappointment of missing out on the Booker this year, Ian McEwan emerged last night as the clear favourite to lift the much fatter cheque for the Whitbread prize.

Joining him on the shortlist for best novel are Andrew Miller, another Booker nominee, for Oxygen, and Helen Dunmore, whose book The Siege, like McEwan's Atonement, mixes memory with traumatic events of the second world war, in her case the siege of Leningrad.

The wild card is the DJ Patrick Neate, whose Twelve Bar Blues, with its circus of characters drawn from New York, New Orleans and the fictional African country of Zimbawi, was loved by many critics.

McEwan has reason to distrust the bookies, having been heavily tipped to lift the Booker only to be pipped by Peter Carey with True History of the Kelly Gang.

Philip Pullman, back in the children's ghetto having made the Booker longlist, seems a safer wager for the children's book with The Amber Spyglass, the last of the His Dark Materials trilogy. He will have to overcome the former Python Terry Jones and Eoin Colfer.

Despite the prize fund being increased to £50,000 this year - more than double the Booker - the BBC, already under attack for reducing its arts coverage to Rolf Harris and a few one-off documentaries, will not be screening the awards ceremony next January.

The writer who claims he could do with the money most is Gerard Woodward, a poet whose fiction debut, August, has been shortlisted for best first novel. Woodward, 40, who admits coming from a family with a "habit of underachieving", earns a crust by filling the chocolate machines at Manchester University.

Another cash-strapped debutant is Sid Smith, who wrote his Something Like a House, set during China's cultural revolution, from travel guides, not having enough money to go there to research his locations.

The poetry prize is seen as a clash between those two grande dames and polar opposites, Wendy Cope and Selima Hill.

Anthony Bailey's much-praised imagining of the life of the painter Vermeer, A View of Delft, is said to have the merest edge in the biography prize. Many critics are also tipping Geoffrey Wall's life of Flaubert and Diana Souhami's Selkirk's Island, which tells the story of the real Robinson Crusoe.

Category winners each get £5,000 and the overall winner £30,000.

Nominations
Whitbread novel award

The Siege: Helen Dunmore

Atonement: Ian McEwan

Oxygen: Andrew Miller

Twelve Bar Blues: Patrick Neate

First novel award

The Oversight: Will Eaves

Something Like a House:Sid Smith

Burning Worm: Carl Tighe

August: Gerard Woodward

Poetry award

The Age of Cardboard and String: Charles Boyle

If I Don't Know: Wendy Cope

Bunny: Selima Hill

Panoramic Lounge-Bar: John Stammers

Biography award

A View of Delft: Anthony Bailey

Boswell's Presumptuous

Task: Adam Sisman

Selkirk's Island: Diana Souhami

Flaubert: A Life: Geoffrey Wall

Children's book of the year

Artemis Fowl: Eoin Colfer

Journey to the River Sea: Eva Ibbotson

The Lady and the Squire: Terry Jones

The Amber Spyglass: Philip Pullman