Ali Smith has topped a poll by the Times Literary Supplement of about 200 critics, academics and authors that set out to find the best British and Irish novelists writing today.

Four of the top five places in the TLS’s ranking of what it dubbed the “New Elizabethans” went to women, with Smith followed by Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Eimear McBride. The project set out, said the TLS’s editor Stig Abell, to avoid the “tendency to fall back on a group of authors who came to prominence a few decades ago”, with writers such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis all failing to make the list. The literary journal said the poll was carried out “in a spirit of mischief”.

Writing in the TLS, critic Alex Clark praised Ali Smith’s most recent work: a projected quartet of state-of-the-nation novels that began with the Man Booker-shortlisted Autumn. “It’s not simply that Smith has chosen to write against the clock, it’s that she is simultaneously mapping her abiding concerns – surveillance, power, art and illusion – on to both natural and human-made cycles of change and renewal,” Clark wrote.

Those polled were asked to nominate 10 writers whose recent books were “among their most impressive”, and whose future work is “the most eagerly anticipated”. The rest of the top 10 are Colm Tóibín, Nicola Barker, Alan Hollinghurst and Anne Enright, with Sebastian Barry and Jon McGregor tying for 10th place.

Clark admitted that the top 10 was “more than tinged with familiarity”, but said that “despite the lack of shocks, it would also – and perhaps this is the point – be hard to argue for the exclusion of any particular writer, nor for there being any lack of stylistic diversity on display”.

David Szalay came in at 11, followed by Kevin Barry, Deborah Levy, Tom McCarthy, Sally Rooney, Kamila Shamsie, Rachel Cusk, Gwendoline Riley, Sarah Waters and Claire-Louise Bennett. Rooney and Bennett have both written only one book apiece: Bennett’s short story collection Pond and Rooney’s novel Conversations With Friends.

Many respondents, who ranged from editors and agents to academics and writers, told the TLS they would choose a different 10 if asked on another day, wrote Clark, with some bemoaning their inability to suggest writers “beyond the usual suspects”. One unnamed respondent said they were as ready to rank their favourite writers as they were to rank their own children, but persevered after considering “the dominance of a group of writers valorised by a generation of literary editors who came of age, as it were, simultaneously with those writers”.

Clark admitted the “challenges” the novel currently faces, from “the collapse of literary fiction’s ability to generate significant revenue” highlighted by a recent Arts Council England report to author Will Self’s warning in the Observer that the novel is “doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony”.

“Put simply, if the novel is borked, then does it matter who’s good at it?” she asked. “Why do we bother, either writers or readers? The answer is simple: it would be too boring not to.”