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The other great dividing line is nationality. Until 2014, the Booker was a Commonwealth and Irish affair. Then the rules opened to any novel written in English and published in Britain, which meant, in practice, the Americans. The shift was seismic. Paul Beatty took the prize in 2016, and George Saunders in 2017, the first back-to-back American wins, and writers from the United States have crowded the longlists ever since. The backlash was real. In 2018, around thirty publishers signed a letter urging the prize to reverse course, fearing a distinctly British institution was being swallowed whole. Some years, the judges appear to lean back the other way. But nationality, once irrelevant to eligibility, is now part of the pattern of who gets in.