The novel “Taiwan Travelogue” by Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi has won the 2026 International Booker Prize.
The winners were announced during a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern gallery.
Under the rules of the prize, the main award of £50,000 will be shared equally between the book’s author, Yang Shuang-zi, and its English translator Lin King. The novel also became the first Booker Prize winner translated from Chinese.
The jury described the book both as a historical love story and as a sharp postcolonial novel. It is not simply a novel, but a subtle literary game. The work is structured as a fictional translation of discovered Japanese memoirs. The plot takes readers to the 1930s, when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule.
At the center of the story is a Japanese writer who embarks on a culinary journey across Taiwan together with a local translator. Feelings develop between the two women, but their relationship unfolds against a backdrop of inequality, colonial power, cultural differences, and class barriers.
The author constructed the form of the novel so masterfully, adding afterwords and numerous notes from fictional and real translators, that after the book’s release in 2020 some readers perceived it as genuine historical memoirs.
British writer Natasha Brown, who chaired the jury, called the book a subtly ironic novel that plays with the themes of language and power and constantly surprises the reader.
Translator Lin King believes the book reflects not only the trauma of the colonial period, but also the everyday life of Taiwanese people. According to her, even in the hardest times people still find room for humor, good food, cinema, ordinary details of life, and love, and culture cannot be reduced solely to experienced pain.
The International Booker Prize was established in 2005. Unlike the Booker Prize, which is awarded annually only to English-language authors from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Commonwealth countries, the International Booker Prize is presented to foreign writers whose books have been translated into English.
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