Taiwan Travelogue Wins International Booker Prize

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 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.

” 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. The Sheffield-based independent press And Other Stories won the prize for the second year in a row.

King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize. 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.

In a March interview, Yáng said she began writing because of the boom in Taiwanese romance novels in the mid-90s. She explained that she wanted to explore Taiwan’s colonial history under Japanese rule using a contemporary Taiwanese lens. Taiwan Travelogue prevailed over five other shortlisted titles: The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, The Witch by Marie NDiaye, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, and The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar.