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A novel seven years in the writing made Kiran Desai both the then youngest winner of the prize and a daughter who went one better than her mother, Anita Desai, a three-time shortlistee.

Another Irish winner, disgruntled bookies, and more chat as to what constitutes a novel. No shortlisted book can be a surprise winner but Anne Enright’s The Gathering came close.

Of course it wasn’t just the power of the prize but when Wolf Hall won, Hilary Mantel’s life changed forever – a previously highly-regarded novelist was suddenly a literary juggernaut.

Victory at last for Howard Jacobson, self-proclaimed as ‘a Jewish Jane Austen’ with The Finkler Question, the first comic novel to win since Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils in 1986.

Another year of judging controversy produced a very uncontroversial winner in Julian Barnes, an author who might have regretted once describing the prize, slightingly, as ‘posh bingo’.

Hilary Mantel ascended to the Booker Prize empyrean with the second volume of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, becoming the first woman to win the prize twice.

The 2013 Booker Prize was won by Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries.The youngest winner at 28 crafts the longest winning book. Her novel is an intricate 832-page Victorian – in both timeframe and scale – epic.

The year the prize was opened up to every nationality. Fears that Americans would now dominate were allayed with a second Antipodean winner in a row, with another historical novel.

The first year of the Booker Prize for Fiction, sponsored by the food wholesalers Booker McConnell Ltd and with a £5,000 cheque for the winner. No one knew quite what to expect.

The start of a noble tradition of Booker Prize rumpuses when one judge, Malcolm Muggeridge, denounced ‘most of the entries’ as ‘mere pornography’ and withdrew his services.