Those who questioned whether reading was high on the list of the singer Lily Allen’s recreations appeared to be vindicated yesterday when the organisers of the £30,000 Orange Prize for fiction admitted that they had dropped her from their panel of judges after she failed to turn up to meetings.

Eyebrows were raised last year when the 22-year-old singer was controversially appointed to the judging team for the highbrow prize.

Reading books seems to have proved too much for Allen, a popular party girl who had a No 1 hit with Smile and regularly features in the gossip columns. At the time of her appointment, critics observed that serious writers had been sacrificed in the pursuit of celebrity.

Kirsty Lang, chairman of this year’s panel, insisted that Allen had been a good choice of judge, and that the critics who had disparaged her were “being snobby and elitist”.

“Life got in the way,” she told The Times. “She lost a baby, her boyfriend left her and she was launching a new TV show. She was under a hell of a lot of pressure. She found the pressure of judging a major book prize on top of everything else too much.”

The singer had taken part in drawing up the longlist “by phone”, she added. “She reads, she writes her own songs. She’s a wordsmith.”

Lang went on to announce the shortlist of six authors chosen by the remaining judges, Lisa Allardice, review editor of The Guardian, the novelist Philippa Gregory and the novelist and journalist Bel Mooney.

In the year that both the Man Booker and the Costa literary awards were won by women, the women-only Orange Prize failed yesterday to shortlist either of those winners.

Anne Enright, the Irish author whose The Gathering won the £50,000 Booker, and A. L. Kennedy, the Scot whose Day won the £30,000 Costa, topped the list of absentees from the shortlist. There were also no places for Deborah Moggach or Linda Grant, a former Orange winner. Both were among the 20 contenders on the Orange longlist last month.

Instead, the judges include three debut novelists with the established writer Rose Tremain.

Among the first-timers is the Briton Sadie Jones, 40, chosen for The Outcast, a portrait of small-town hypocrisy described by The Times as “elegantly written”.

Getting on to the shortlist was rewarding, Jones said, as she had struggled to find recognition as a screenwriter. She had managed to cope with the rejection by writing “to stay sane” and paid the bills by temping, working as a waitress and doing other odd jobs.

The Orange judges were struck by Jones’s ability to evoke “a sense of period, postwar Britain, and stifling middle-class hypocrisy”. Lang said: “We can see this book as a film.” Jones first wrote the story as a screenplay, one of many that failed to get beyond the manuscript stage.

The Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, now in its 13th year, celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing around the world. Another first-timer is the Canadian Heather O’Neill, for Lullabies for Little Criminals, and an American, Patricia Wood, for Lottery.

The judges chose another Canadian author, Nancy Huston, for Fault Lines, her eleventh novel, and the British Charlotte Mendelson for her third novel, When We Were Bad, a story about Liberal Jews in England.

Tremain was selected for her tenth novel, The Road Home, a story about Lev, a modern-day economic migrant from Poland.

The shortlist was announced weeks after leading authors questioned whether there was any need for the Orange Prize when women writers were winning prizes in fair competition with men.

A. S. Byatt told The Times that the Orange was a “sexist prize” and that she had forbidden her publishers from submitting her novels.

The winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London on June 4.

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