THE award winning Scottish poet Robin Robertson is in the running for the leading prize in fiction, The Man Booker Prize.

Robertson, a writer and editor who is already a winner of many accolades for his poetry, has been short listed for his book The Long Take, described as a "lyrical tribute to the power of writing."

The book is a first for the Booker short-list, as it is a novel in verse, and its story also contains photographs.

Robertson, born in Perthshire in 1955 and now resident in London, has won three Forward Prizes for poetry and the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His book, released this year, joins a list that includes two debut novels, including one for the youngest author to ever make the list, and a second showing for the Canadian writer Esi Edugyan.

READ MORE: The Herald's review of The Long Take

Robertson is joined by Anna Burns, Edugyan, Daisy Johnson, Rachel Kushner, and Richard Powers on the short list for the £50,000 prize.

Robertson, long regarded as one of Scotland's leading poets, was also the editor of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, which was longlisted this year.

At 27, Ms Johnson is the youngest author ever to make the shortlist for her novel Everything Under.

The Long Take has been highly praised by the judges.

Jacqueline Rose, a judge, said it offers a wholly unique literary voice and form and was a "pageant of loss."

She said: "A verse novel with photographs, it manages to evoke with exceptional vividness aspects of post-World War Two history that are rarely parsed together.

"Swinging effortlessly between combat with its traumatic aftermath, and the brute redevelopment of American cities, The Long Take shows us the ravages of capitalism as a continuation of war-time violence by other means.

"It is also a bold, eloquent homage to cinema as perhaps the only medium in which the true history of America has been preserved."

She added: "This is a genre-defying novel.

"Cutting from battlefield to building demolitions in San Francisco and LA, to the killing of black men on the streets of America today, it imports into the very form of the writing one of the most famous film techniques: cross-cutting.

"You could be in the cinema, or listening to an elegy, or reading the story of one man’s devastating experience as he tries to rebuild the shards of his life after the war."

READ MORE: A Herald 'Poem of the Day' by Robin Robertson

The Man Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality writing in English and published in the UK and Ireland.

This year’s shortlist recognises three writers from the UK, two from the US, and one from Canada.

Two novels from independent publishers, Faber & Faber and Serpent’s Tail, are shortlisted, alongside three from Penguin Random House, and one from Pan Macmillan imprint Picador.

The chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: "All of our six finalists are miracles of stylistic invention.

"In each of them the language takes centre stage.

"And yet in every other respect they are remarkably diverse, exploring a multitude of subjects ranging across space and time.

"From Ireland to California, in Barbados and the Arctic, they inhabit worlds that not everyone will have been to, but which we can all be enriched by getting to know.

"Each one explores the anatomy of pain — among the incarcerated and on a slave plantation, in a society fractured by sectarian violence, and even in the natural world."

Edugyan, author of Washington Black, is the only 2018 contender to have been shortlisted previously, for Half-Blood Blues in 2011.

The 2018 winner will be announced on Tuesday 16 October in London’s Guildhall.

The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book.

The winner will receive a further £50,000 and can expect instant international recognition.