The 2010s were a hugely significant decade for the Booker, largely due to the shift in rules which came into place in 2014. From that year onwards, the Prize was open to all novels published in the English language, replacing the long-held (and many might say, dated) criteria that focused on authors of British, Irish and Commonwealth heritage. This shift led to a lot of hand-wringing and fretting about the potential “domination” of the Prize by US authors, and a dilution of what the Prize stood for.

The Booker in the Nineties was all big ideas, grand narratives and excess, a decade distilled in book form under the glare of the tabloid press. In some sense this held true as the new millennium rolled over… and it some senses, well, it didn’t at all. As in the rest of life, and culture, the Booker in the Noughties felt more fragmented. More individual stories shining a light on hitherto ignored groups, but with the dominant Bookerati never too far around the corner.

In this mass media glare of the 90s Booker,  there’s evidence here and there of yet more self-consciousness on the part of the rotating panel of judges. There’s the occasional tendency to try to replicate old success stories, which more often than not falls flat. Experimentation happens here and there, welcome when it does, however successful. We start to get a firmer sense of “Booker type” novels, leading to a sense of exhaustion with some of the winners. More importantly, the sense that many of those “Booker type” novels come from the pens of a certain “Booker type” author (white, middle class, overwhelmingly male) can no longer be ignored.

After the Seventies saw the Booker taking its tentative first steps, stumbling here and there, occasionally landing on a genuine classic but more often than not serving up curiosities rather than solid-gold genius, we venture into more solid ground in the Eighties.

There’s a sense here of more self-awareness, of the need for winners to feel “important” and make a statement of some kind. There are certainly more hits than misses, and even the latter are perhaps in some ways more interesting than those of the previous decade.