Taiwan Travelogue, a novel written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King, has become the first book originally written in Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker prize.
Yáng and King were announced as the winners of the £50,000 prize – to be split equally between them – during a ceremony at Tate Modern, London, on Tuesday evening.
The novel is presented as a translation of a rediscovered memoir, written from the perspective of a novelist who sails to Japan-occupied Taiwan in 1938 and embarks on a culinary tour in the company of an interpreter, with whom she falls in love. The book features fictional footnotes and afterwords by the book’s characters as well as “real” ones by King, which “wrap an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story”, said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown.
It’s the second year in a row that the Sheffield-based independent press And Other Stories has taken home the prize, following Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, last year.
Taiwan Travelogue “pulls off an incredible double feat”, added Brown, succeeding as “both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel”.
Yáng and King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize, which recognises the best fiction translated into English. The original Mandarin Chinese publication won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod award, and King’s English translation won the US National book award for translated literature in 2024.
Along with fiction, Yáng writes essays, manga and video game scripts. King also writes original fiction – her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming.
In her acceptance speech, Yang touched on Taiwan’s politics, saying: “Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics, but I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown.
“In this sense, literature, on a fundamental level, cannot disentangle itself from politics. When surveying the modern history of Taiwan’s literature, it is apparent that we writers have been asking the same question for the past century: What kind of future do the people of Taiwan want?”
King said in her speech that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine had inspired her to translate only writing from Taiwan for the foreseeable future. “My goal for myself and my fellow translators is to bring so many voices from Taiwan into English that no one can reduce Taiwan’s literature to a monolith, because we are not a chorus but a cacophony, self-contradicting and unruly, just like any healthy, robust democracy.”
In a March interview on the Booker prize website, Yáng said that she began writing because of the boom in Taiwanese romance novels in the mid-90s. “My middle school classmates decided to form a writing group together, though of the five of us, I’m the only one who kept writing,” she said.
Asked about the inspiration for Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng explained that while “both Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese empire”, Koreans “seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia. Using a contemporary Taiwanese lens, I wanted to untangle the complex circumstances that Taiwan’s people faced in the past, and to explore what kind of future we ought to strive toward.”
Taiwan Travelogue prevailed over five other shortlisted titles: The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, and The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin.
Brown was joined on the judging panel by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and the writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy. This year’s prize was open to long-form fiction and short-story collections translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026.
Previous winners of the International Booker prize include Han Kang for The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, and Olga Tokarczuk for Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft.
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To browse all shortlisted titles for The International Booker prize 2026, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
