LONDON — Novels by three American and three British authors made the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize for Fiction, one of the world’s most prestigious literary accolades, the prize committee announced on Wednesday.

That half of the writers on shortlist this year are American — Paul Auster, Emily Fridlund and George Saunders — immediately revived anxieties about the 2013 decision to open the prize to any novel written in English and published in Britain, regardless of the author’s nationality, rather than restricting it to writers from Britain, Ireland, Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth.

“All we can say is that we judge the books that are submitted to us,” Lola Young, chairwoman of the 2017 judging panel, said at a news conference announcing the list. “We make our judgment based not on anyone’s nationality or their gender or anything else other than what is written on those pages.”

Last year, Paul Beatty became the first American to win the prize, for “The Sellout.”

Asked at a news conference about the fear that Americans might dominate the prize, Ms. Young said, “One could say that time will tell — we’ve done the job that we were asked to do with the texts that were submitted to us.”