The 2019 Rathbones Folio prize longlist spans the world, from a Booker-winning novel set amid the Troubles in Northern Ireland to a life of St Francis of Assisi told in verse.

Leading the charge for fiction on a list which celebrates the best work published in any genre are Anna Burns’s Milkman, which won the 2018 Booker prize, Sally Rooney’s Costa novel award-winning Normal People, and Will Eaves’s Murmur, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmith’s prize. Other novels among the 20 books longlisted for the award include Diana Evans’s Ordinary People, Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds, Carys Davies’ West and a polyphonic novel of modern Native American life from Tommy Orange, There There.

Ann Wroe’s Francis: A Life in Songs is one of three collections of poetry in contention for the £30,000 award, taking a slot alongside Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance and Zaffar Kunial’s exploration of identity, Us.

Nonfiction titles on the list include a biography of Nietzsche from Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite!, an account of a year spent tramping through east London from Bob Gilbert, Ghost Trees, and a meditation on the frozen north from Nancy Campbell, The Library of Ice.

All the books selected for the prize longlist, which was founded in 2013 and is open to authors writing in English from all over the world, are chosen by an academy of more than 250 writers and critics including Jeanette Winterson, JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith.

Academy members Kate Clanchy, Chloe Aridjis and Owen Sheers make up the judging panel for the 2019 award.

The prize’s co-founder Andrew Kidd paid tribute to the breadth of the judges’ selection, hailing it as a list with “something for everyone”.

“Arriving at a longlist from the 80 outstanding books nominated by the Folio academy was never going to be easy,” he said. “But Kate, Chloe and Owen have applied themselves with a mixture of serious intent and good humour to give us a selection of titles that is thrilling in its richness, diversity and range.”

Previous winners include George Saunders, who won the inaugural award in 2014, Hisham Matar in 2017 and Richard Lloyd Parry, who took the 2018 award with Ghosts of the Tsunami.

The shortlist will be announced on 4 April, with the winner crowned at a ceremony held in the British Library on 20 May.

The 2019 Rathbones Folio longlist

Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young (Bloomsbury)
The Crossway by Guy Stagg (Picador)
Francis: A Life in Songs by Ann Wroe (Chatto and Windus)
Ghost Trees by Bob Gilbert (Saraband)
House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Atlantic)
I Am Dynamite! by Sue Prideaux (Faber)
Land of the Living by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury)
The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell (Scribner)
Little by Edward Carey (Gallic Books)
Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly (Unbound)
Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber)
Mothers by Chris Power (Faber)
Murmur by Will Eaves (CB Editions)
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber)
Ordinary People by Diana Evans (Chatto and Windus)
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins)
Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif (Bloomsbury)
There There by Tommy Orange (Harvill Secker)
Us by Zaffar Kunial (Faber)
West by Carys Davies (Granta)