Shortly after I had decided I wanted to be a writer, I discovered two books that changed my life: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. I’d found each separately, but quickly saw a connecting thread: both had won the Man Booker prize. The prize was an indication of a kind of book I was desperately seeking, opening up a new world of contemporary global novels. The next few years I obsessively read Booker winners, to the exclusion of anything else – discovering JM Coetzee, Keri Hulme, James Kelman and so many others. These novels captivated me in a way winners of the Pulitzer never could, and from my earliest days as a writer, I wanted to win the Booker. Here was an award, I thought, worth renouncing my US citizenship for.

I’m disappointed I no longer have to. The decision to broaden the award to include writers from the United States takes something special away from it: the sense that its purpose was to celebrate dispatches from the furthest reaches of the Commonwealth, from Northern Ireland to Nigeria.

Nor are Americans particularly hurting for one more book award – between the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and a slew of PEN/fill-in-the-blanks, we’re pretty well covered. I’m sure Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler are honored to be shortlisted, but there’s never really been much pressure from the American literary community to be included. From over here, it’s hard not to agree with those who’ve criticized the Booker Foundation’s move as one borne of desperation and a desire to stay relevant.

But neither am I convinced by the arguments that the inclusion of Americans in the Man Booker will, in Susanna Rustin’s words, narrow its horizons. The prize’s horizons have already narrowed. In 1999 Coetzee became the first writer to win a second Booker, but two others have done it since. One is Hilary Mantel; the other is Peter Carey, who has had over a third of his novels long- or shortlisted (and who complained on Monday about the inclusion of American writers). As an American watching the Booker for the past few years, it’s been depressing to see the same bunch of predictable, predominantly English novelists nominated time and again: Carey, McEwan, Byatt, Barnes. This year’s shortlist includes Ali Smith, who’s already been shortlisted twice before, and Howard Jacobson, who was longlisted in 2006 and won in 2010.

There are, of course, notable exceptions to this glut – first-time novelists and those beyond the British Isles or Australia still win. But the problem seems to me less that Americans are being considered than that the same names keep reappearing. Is the Commonwealth really so devoid of great writers that you keep coming back to the same handful? That Mantel won for back-to-back novels from the same trilogy suggests a difficulty in seeing beyond the well-known to find the strange voices once celebrated by the Booker. One hopes Eleanor Catton’s win last year is not a fluke, and that the juries will continue to recognize lesser-known voices. But I’m not overly optimistic, and to put the blame on Americans is to miss larger problems facing the prize.

What I learned from the Booker Prize so many years ago was that what mattered in a novel was a writer’s singularity of voice and vision, not country of origin. So if it takes looking to the United States to find the next Keri Hulme, I’m all for it.