Tradition decrees that no major literary prize is complete without a decent ding-dong. This may be the fault of journalists - those people over there, you understand - since "Twenty Interesting Novels in Running for Book Prize" is not the most compelling headline.

These rows almost invariably slot into one of three categories - Omission scandal! Inexpert Judge Outrage! Selection Criteria Injustice! But they do at least generate the publicity that is the main justification for holding these annual library beauty contests.

Novelist Tim Lott fired this year's first salvo with a deliberately provocative piece in the Sunday Telegraph ahead of today's longlist announcement. His line is that the award is a "sexist con-trick": If there is a gender hegemony in publishing these days, Lott says, it's a female one: women occupy the key jobs in publishing, they read most novels, and they tend to win most prizes, particularly the ones with real commercial clout, like the Richard & Judy award. It's "discriminatory, and it should be shunned - or, at the very least, mocked mercilessly."

The cudgels continue to swing in this morning's Times, where AS Byatt and John Sutherland have been recruited to the fray. "Such a prize was never needed," Byatt says, adding that she forbids her publisher from submitting her books for the competition. Sutherland meanwhile says that any prize which "ghettoises" books by women does them more harm than good.

Also in the Times, Erica Wagner takes the Inexpert Judge! Line, adding her voice to the anxieties expressed earlier when Lily Allen's appointment to the judging panel was announced. Apart from that, she says, prizes are always unfair, get over it, folks.

Here, Charlotte Higgins picks a more or less fresh-minted controversy, reporting that fictional versions of the "misery memoir" dominate this year's entries, echoing judge Muriel Gray's complaint last year that too much women's fiction was drearily domestic. She quotes the chair of the judges, Kirsty Lang, saying: ""There were a hell of a lot of abused children and family secrets."

The Independent, meanwhile, rises above any kind of affray with some low-key internationalism, marking the nomination of novelist Elif Shafak, whose novel The Bastard of Istanbul had led to her prosecution in her native Turkey for "denigrating" the country with references to the Armenian genocide.

Cynics may note that this is otherwise pretty familiar territory: The appointment of Suzanne Vega to the judges in 2001 caused some minor consternation at the time, and Nadine Gordimer has also announced that she won't allow her books to run for the prize. Indeed, today's headline star AS Byatt first expressed her reservations about the prize back in 1996, its inaugural year.

Oh well. We do now know that 20 interesting novels we may not have heard of before have been nominated for a major literary prize, at least.