Ibrahim Nasrallah, whose writing has run into frequent difficulties with the Jordanian censors, is shortlisted for the international prize for Arabic fiction for his novel Time of White Horses, which charts the history of three generations of a Palestinian family in a small village, from Ottoman rule to the modern era.

The shortlist of six books for the $60,000 (£40,000) prize cover a topical range of subjects, from Iraqi writer Inaam Kachachi's The American Granddaughter, about an American-Iraqi woman who returns to Iraq as an interpreter for the US army, to Egyptian novelist Mohammad Al-Bisatie's Hunger, an account of day-to-day life close to starvation, and Tunisian author Al-Habib Al-Salmi's The Scents of Marie-Claire, which centres on the relationship between an Arab man and a Western woman.

The line-up is completed with The Unfaithful Translator by the Syrian author Fawwaz Haddad, about a translator accused of betrayal for his dissident views, and Egyptian Yusuf Zaydan's Beelzebub, set in fifth century Egypt and dealing with the Roman Empire's adoption of Christianity.

Chair of the prize's board of trustees Jonathan Taylor said the award was intended to make a wider readership aware of Arabic literature. "There is a considerable body of contemporary Arabic fiction of a very high quality which is being written year on year, some of it by women, and this literary fiction should be available to a wider readership," he said. "The purpose of the prize is to recognise and reward high quality Arabic fiction, and to bring it to a wider audience through securing translations."