After withdrawals and walkouts at its last outing in 2011, the biennial Man Booker International prize is hoping calm will return with a globetrotting list of 10 finalists for the 2013 award, headed by the American novelist Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson, who was shortlisted for the 2011 award, is one of only three authors writing in English on a shortlist for the £60,000 prize. The rest of the field brings together novelists from around the world and includes writing translated from French, German, Hebrew and Kannada. She is also one of just three women on the list, along with the American writer Lydia Davis and the French novelist Marie NDiaye. Two of the authors, China's Yan Lianke and Russia's Vladimir Sorokin, have been censored in their home countries.

Speaking on the phone from the prize's launch at the Jaipur Literature festival, one of the judges, the author and critic Tim Parks, said he was delighted with the list: "Ten wonderful authors, nine of whom I didn't know before I started reading for this prize. There were lots of surprises for all of us."

There was no conscious decision to reverse the domination of the shortlist by English-speaking writers from previous years, he said, but the judges were "very determined to look at books from everywhere. We wanted to try to free ourselves from looking only in safe areas."

There was also no system put in place to address the gender imbalance among previous nominees, three quarters of whom have been men. The chairman of the judges, Christopher Ricks, stressed the genuinely global reach of the 2013 list with authors aged between 45 and 89, but said the panel "didn't take any steps at all" to increase the representation of women authors.

"I'm glad that we didn't arrive at the list by any kind of calculation," he said.

Whil~ issues of gender were "terribly difficult", Parks added, the judges, three of whom were women, had "decided not to make it a huge issue", preferring to focus instead on finding "the best novels".

"What could you do about it?" he asked. "Make a shortlist of five for men and five for women? That sort of thing is deeply troubling."

Parks was also relaxed about the challenge of comparing bodies of work that are so various, saying that the judges only considered authors who have published at least three works of fiction in English.

"You get enough of an idea from three novels," he said. "Three great books is a major achievement."

UR Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Josip Novakovich (Canada) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland) make up the rest of the list. In the wake of John le Carré's withdrawal from the 2011 award, saying he didn't "compete for literary prizes", organisers are hoping the 2013 finalists will make their way to the starting line in good order.

Parks, who was joined on an expanded judging panel by the critic Elif Batuman as well as the novelists Aminatta Forna and Yiyun Li, said he was "quite surprised at how much agreement there has been". He is not expecting any of his colleagues to follow Carmen Callil, who resigned in 2011 when her fellow judges awarded the prize to Philip Roth, a writer she didn't "rate … at all".

The winner of the Man Booker International prize will be announced in London on 22 May 2013. A translated winner may award a prize of £15,000 to one of their translators into English. The previous winners of the accolade are the American novelist Philip Roth, the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and the Albanian author Ismail Kadare, who won the inaugural prize in 2005.