Hilary Mantel will compete with six newcomers and 13 other accomplished writers who have been longlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction.

Originally known as the Orange Prize, this year the award has been titled Women's Prize for Fiction after the phone company dropped out from sponsoring the prize to concentrate on cinema sponsorship. From among 140 writers, 20 have been longlisted to contend for this year's award. Among them, the most popular author is Man Booker and Costa Prize winner Hilary Mantel.

Just last week, Mantel won the $60,000 "British Nobel" David Cohen prize for lifetime achievement. "I think it's important to not think like that," said Natasha Walter, a member of the judging panel. "You've got to choose what makes this set of judges most passionate and try not to think about the prizes that have gone before."

According to Walter, though it's great that Mantel is winning so many prizes, she thinks there's a long way to go before women writers are fully celebrated.

The longlist, which includes six first novels, is unquestionably diverse with books that tackle all manner of tricky subjects including Muslim honor codes like Elif Shafak's "Honour", bereavement as in Kitty Aldridge's "A Trick I Learned from Dead Men", and a 54-year-old man's questionable relationship with a girl of 11 like "Lamb" by Bonnie Nadzam.

"I can't pick out a dominating theme and I like that," said Walter. "That's what makes it exciting, you move from voice to voice and place to place with these books and it's great when you get something unlike anything you've read before."

The full longlist is as below:

Kitty Aldridge - A Trick I Learned From Dead Men

Kate Atkinson - Life After Life

Ros Barber - The Marlowe Papers

Shani Boianjiu - The People of Forever are Not Afraid

Gillian Flynn - Gone Girl

Sheila Heti - How Should A Person Be?

AM Homes -  May We Be Forgiven

Barbara Kingsolver - Flight Behaviour

Deborah Copaken Kogan - The Red Book

Hilary Mantel - Bring Up the Bodies

Bonnie Nadzam - Lamb

Emily Perkins - The Forrests

Michèle Roberts - Ignorance

Francesca Segal - The Innocents

Maria Semple - Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Elif Shafak - Honour

Zadie Smith - NW

ML Stedman  - The Light Between Oceans

Carrie Tiffany - Mateship with Birds

G Willow Wilson  - Alif the Unseen