Only the second time poetry has reached the shortlist, Andrew McMillan’s Physical lines up with novels, short stories and Russia reportage for 2015 prize

The heady scent of sensuality surrounds the 2015 Guardian first book award, as a series of “hymns to the male body” becomes only the second collection of poetry to be shortlisted for the prize.

Andrew McMillan’s exploration of modern masculinity, Physical, is one of six debuts in contention for the £10,000 award. This examination of what it means to be a man in the 21st century interrogates contemporary gay life to reflect on connections between bodies and souls.

In Urination, the 27-year-old poet opens by worrying about “bumping someone while they piss” in a urinal, before writing of the “intimacy” of the toilet, shared only with parents and then with lovers, “when say on a Sunday / morning stretching into the bathroom / you wake to the sound of stream into bowl / and go to hug the naked body / stood with its back to you and kiss the neck / and taste the whole of the night on there / and smell the morning’s pale yellow loss / and take the whole of him in your hand / and feel the water moving through him”. While in Jacob With the Angel, he reimagines the biblical story as a sexual encounter between gay lovers, “tangling in the unpierced flesh of one another / grappling with the shifting question of each other’s bodies”.

McMillan puts physical anxieties under the lens in a poem that opens: “The men are weeping in the gym / using the hand dryer to cover their sobs / their hearts have grown too big / for their chests their chests have grown too big / for their shirts … they are crying in the toilet”.

Announcing the shortlist, Guardian books editor Claire Armitstead said that McMillan’s poems had “totally disarmed” her. “As a middle-aged, heterosexual woman, I’d assumed they wouldn’t be for me, but I found them tender and sexy and entirely relatable,” said Armitstead. “They carried me straight back to my teenage infatuation with the work of Thom Gunn, another gay poet, who is one of McMillan’s touchstones for Physical.”

McMillan is one of six writers shortlisted for the prize, which rewards debuts in any genre, and which has been won in the past by Zadie Smith, Kevin Powers, Petina Gappah, and last year by short story writer Colin Barrett.

Three novels make the cut this year for the judging panel of historian Tom Holland, broadcaster Emily Maitlis, poet Kei Miller and critic Alex Clark. Max Porter was shortlisted for his story of a Ted Hughes scholar and his two young sons grappling with their mother’s death, and visits from Hughes’s mythological Crow, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. Sara Taylor was picked for The Shore, a series of interlinked stories set on islands off the coast of Virginia, and Chigozie Obioma for his Booker-shortlisted The Fishermen, in which four brothers skip school in 1990s Nigeria with tragic results.

Diane Cook was selected by judges for her debut short story collection, Man v Nature, while just one non-fiction title makes the shortlist this year: Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, a look at 21st-century Russia.

“This has been a great year for fiction, with writers pushing at all sorts of boundaries, whether through the hybrid form of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, a profound and moving look at family bereavement partly narrated by a crow, or the fusion of African and western literary traditions in Chigozie Obioma’s fraternal tragedy The Fishermen,” said Armitstead.

She added that non-fiction was “harder to find this year”, but that Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible “brings a dazzling eye for detail to the surreal excesses of Russian society”.

Five Waterstones reading groups from around the country helped judge the prize, with Leeds and Manchester both ranking McMillan’s collection among their favourites. “This writer has a talent for drawing the unconsidered frailty from the rough, the ready and the mundane,” said Manchester’s book group, while Leeds found its exploration of fragility and masculinity “not only accomplished, but in most cases flat-out ingenious”.

The winner will be announced on 25 November.

The shortlist

Man v Nature by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)

Physical by Andrew McMillan (Jonathan Cape)

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (One/ Pushkin Press)

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (Faber)

Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter (Faber)

The Shore by Sara Taylor (William Heinemann)

