Andrea Levy, the first author to have won the Whitbread and Orange book prizes in the same year, was shortlisted today for two separate prizes within the British Book Awards, billed as the Oscars of the publishing world.

One of the awards, launched this year, is restricted to writers of African, Caribbean or Asian descent. The 49-year-old writer, shortlisted for Small Island, a grim exploration of England as the first wave of immigrants from Jamaica arrive to discover that the mother country is racist, applauded the prize organisers for introducing such a category.

"I don’t call it segregation," Ms Levy said. "You’re trying to raise the profile of something. You’re showing that something’s working. Sometimes it needs a helping hand."

Ms Levy, the child of parents who were among the first postwar immigrants to sail from the Caribbean, was speaking to The Times in the week that Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, suggested that black boys may have to be segregated from other children in some subjects to improve grades.

The new Decibel Writer of the Year prize for "writers of fiction, narrative non-fiction or poetry of an African, Caribbean or Asian descent" could do for black and Asian writers what the Orange prize had done for women’s fiction, she said.

"It raises the profile with people who wouldn’t otherwise read it, thinking, ‘it’s a black writer and therefore not for me’. When Small Island first came out, I was initially nervous. But it’s lovely to have an audience. This is getting people to look at something they may not have felt had relevance for them."

Ms Levy' faces competition for the Writer of the Year prize from Hari Kunzru, Benjamin Zephaniah and Malorie Blackman, and for the Literary Fiction prize from Susanna Clarke, David Mitchell and Colm Toibin.

Nick McDowell, the head of literature at the Arts Council, which is sponsoring the award, said: "This is a great time to be recognising and celebrating the best black and Asian writers. Arts Council England is committed to supporting the increased engagement of black and Asian people as writers, readers and publishers in England."

The 16th Annual British Book Awards will take place on April 20 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London, and will be broadcast in an hour-long programme on Channel 4 on the April 22. Last year’s event had a television audience of more than two million, the biggest ever for a book programme.

The Awards are nicknamed "the Nibbies", a reference to the pen-nib shaped awards that are given to winners. Previous recipients of the Book of the Year include Billy by Pamela Stephenson in 2001, Birthday Letters by the late poet laureate, Ted Hughes, in 1998, and Wild Swans by Jung Chang in 1993. Previous winners of the Author of the Year award include Philip Pullman, J.K Rowling and Salman Rushdie.

This year’s nominations, in a dozen categories, include the footballer Paul Gascoigne, whose Gazza: My Story is up against Olympic runner Kelly Holmes for My Olympic Ten Days. Between them they have sold more than 250,000 books. Both are among contenders for the Sports Book of the Year award, for which gold medal oarsman Matthew Pinsent and rugby coach Clive Woodward are also nominated.

The actress Sheila Hancock is shortlisted for Author of the Year and Biography of the Year for her acclaimed memoir, The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw.

The Book of the Year prize sees Dan Brown’s bestselling thriller, The Da Vinci Code, up against the ever-popular Michael Palin with his book Himalaya.

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