A debut novel set in a beehive and dubbed “the Animal Farm of the 21st century” by chair of judges Shami Chakrabarti has made the shortlist for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, alongside books from some of the most acclaimed writers working today.

Laline Paull’s The Bees tells the story of Flora 717, a lowly, ugly sanitation worker in her hive who reaches the Queen’s inner sanctum. The author, a screenwriter and playwright turned novelist, will compete for the £30,000 Baileys prize with five authors who have all been previously shortlisted for the award, organisers announced.

Ali Smith was selected this time for her multiple award-winning How to Be Both, Sarah Waters was chosen for The Paying Guests, set in London in 1922, and Rachel Cusk was picked for Outline, in which an author travels to Athens to teach a creative writing course.

The six-strong line-up is completed with Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone, the story of a Pashtun soldier who fights in Ypres in 1915, and Anne Tyler’s look at the lives of the Whitshank family, A Spool of Blue Thread.

“They are all fantastic,” said Chakrabarti. “They are very different in various ways – subject matter, genre, style. Some are sparse, some poetic. What they have in common is that you can’t put them down.”

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction judges with the 2015 shortlisted titles. Photograph: PR

Paull, who wrote her first novel aged seven but set it aside after her family described it as “‘sweet’ - I thought ‘no, it’s really serious and dramatic’” - said that it was “extremely exciting but quite strange” to find herself on the Baileys shortlist.

“In my family we didn’t know anyone who made a living from writing – I thought ‘I can’t do it’,” she said. “It took me a long time to build up my conviction to just write.”

After working as a receptionist at a film company, trainee film-financier and then a screenwriter, then turning to the theatre after her daughter was born, she decided to take the plunge back into novel-writing, and took a creative writing course. The idea about the bees came to her half way through – a beekeeper friend had recently died, her eulogy full of quotes about bees.

“Because I was in this very open state, everything clicked. The emotional range was there, and my imagination fired. I just went for it,” she said. “I thought I’d got nothing to lose – I was in complete obscurity.”

Chakrabarti called The Bees “the Animal Farm of the 21st century. On one hand you get the originality and the cheekiness and the brilliant idea – to talk about society and politics in the context of a beehive. But then the writing is so good that you believe Flora is a person.”

The Liberty director also praised Shamsie’s “exquisite research”, describing A God in Every Stone as “such an enterprise, such ambition”. Tyler, the one American novelist on the shortlist, “is clearly a master storyteller – the novel is like a really amazing designer garment so brilliantly put together you can’t see the stitches”. Smith’s How to Be Both is “James Joyce meets Virginia Woolf for the 21st century”, and Cusk’s Outline “so self-effacing and yet so intriguing”. The Paying Guests, meanwhile, “will have your heart racing from start to finish – you so care about the outcome and are so immersed in it you can’t put it down”.

Bookmaker William Hill immediately made Waters its favourite to win the award, at 2/1, with Smith at 3/1, Cusk and Tyler both at 5/1, and Paull and Shamsie both at 6/1.

Now in its 20th year, the prize – formerly known as the Orange – sets out to reward “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women from throughout the world”. It has been won in the past by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun, by Zadie Smith for On Beauty and by Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin, with this year’s winner to be announced on 3 June.

Chakrabarti’s fellow judges are Everyday Sexism Project founder Laura Bates, columnist Grace Dent, author and former Orange prize winner Helen Dunmore, and Channel 4 news presenter Cathy Newman.

The Baileys prize shortlist:

Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber/Vintage

The Bees by Laline Paull (Fourth Estate)

A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)

How to Be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus)

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago)