Jhumpa Lahiri among Booker Prize finalists

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri and Irish novelist Colm Toibin are among six finalists for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.

British-born Lahiri's "The Lowland" and Toibin's "The Testament of Mary" are on the shortlist announced on Tuesday for the 50,000-pound ($78,000) prize.

The other finalists are "We Need New Names" by Zimbabwe's NoViolet Bulawayo; "The Luminaries" by New Zealand-based Eleanor Catton; "Harvest" by Britain's Jim Crace; and "A Tale for the Time Being" by Canada's Ruth Ozeki.

Crace and Toibin are both previous Booker finalists.

Lahiri, a member of President Barack Obama's President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, and Connecticut-born Ozeki provide an unusually strong American accent to the prize, which is only open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth.