The women-only Orange prize for fiction set out yesterday to discover the British public's most cherished contemporary novels - and found that 58% were by men.

But organisers said this margin was smaller than it would have been before the prize was founded to promote writing by women eight years ago.

Eight out of 50 titles chosen for an "essential bookshelf" of modern works have figured on Orange award shortlists.

They are Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters; Fred and Edie, by Jill Dawson; Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels; Hotel World, by Ali Smith; The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver; Unless, by Carol Shields; White Teeth, by Zadie Smith; and Margaret Atwood's Booker prize-winning The Blind Assassin. None won the Orange award, but they did better in the poll than any of the volumes that did.

Kate Mosse, the prize's organiser and founder, said the results showed that the prize was doing its job.

The books were nominated by a sample of 500 people attending the first week of the Guardian Hay festival, which ends tomorrow.

This discerning public mostly picked books which it discovered as hardbacks rather than as spin-offs from films or television.

Nort was it seduced by hype for recent ephemeral bestsellers. Two of the oldest books on the list, Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, were published respectively in 1962 and 1969. Almost all the titles are more than three years old and have had time to ripen into favourites. They also include Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children of 1981.

This pattern is in contrast to last year's BBC Big Read. Almost all the top choices then, Tolkien, Harry Potter, Douglas Adams, Louis de Bernieres, had momentum from TV or cinema.

The top 50 essential contemporary reads

(As nominated by a sample of 500 people attending the Guardian Hay festival. In alphabetical order)

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Being Dead by Jim Crace
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
Faith Singer by Rosie Scott
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Fred and Edie by Jill Dawson
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Hotel World by Ali Smith
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Misery by Stephen King
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Money by Martin Amis
Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Riders by Jilly Cooper
Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The House of Spirits by Isabelle Allende
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Rabbit Books by John Updike
The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Women's Room by Marilyn French
Tracey Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Unless by Carol Shields
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
White Teeth by Zadie Smith