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Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King have won the International Booker Prize for “Taiwan Travelogue,” a historical romance set in Japan-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s.
It is the first novel written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious award for fiction translated into English.
The book purports to be a travel memoir by a Japanese novelist on a culinary tour of Taiwan and charts the fictional writer’s complex relationship with her local interpreter.
British novelist Natasha Brown, who chaired the judging panel, called it a “captivating, wryly sophisticated” book that plays with themes of language and power and offers the reader surprises along the way.
The panel also praised the way Taiwanese-American translator King’s translation adds another layer to a book that plays with ideas of communication across languages.
Prize money of £50,000 (€57,000) is shared between author and translator.
Yáng, who writes fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, has said she “wanted to untangle the complex circumstances” of Taiwan’s time as a Japanese colony.
“Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,” she told the Booker Prizes website.
Published in its original language in 2020, “Taiwan Travelogue” is the first of Yáng’s books to be translated into English. In the United States, it won the National Book Award’s translation category in 2024.
Despite only publishing in March this year in the UK – following the longlist announcement in February, “Taiwan Travelogue_”_ was the second-bestselling title on the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist.
To date, rights have been sold in a total of 23 territories, ranging from Serbia to Indonesia and Brazil to Ukraine.
The International Booker was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages — which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain — and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators.