Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King, won the International Booker prize on Tuesday evening, making it the first book originally written in Mandarin Chinese to take the award. The pair were announced as winners at Tate Modern in London and will split the £50,000 prize equally.
The novel is presented as a translation of a rediscovered memoir, but its structure keeps shifting under the reader’s feet. It follows a novelist who sails to Japan-occupied Taiwan in 1938, goes on a culinary tour with an interpreter and falls in love with her. Alongside that romance, the book layers in fictional footnotes and afterwords written by the characters, while King adds real footnotes and afterwords in the English translation.
Judging chair Natasha Brown said the book “wraps an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story” and “pulls off an incredible double feat,” praising it as “both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” The panel, which also included Marcus du Sautoy, Sophie Hughes, Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy, chose Taiwan Travelogue 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.
The win gives Yáng and King another milestone after the original Mandarin Chinese publication won Taiwan’s Golden Tripod award and King’s translation took the US National Book Award for translated literature in 2024. It also makes them the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the International Booker, which recognises the best fiction translated into English.
Yáng has said she began writing because of the boom in Taiwanese romance novels in the mid-90s, and that a middle school writing group helped set her on the path. In an interview on the Booker prize website in March 2026, she said that while both Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese empire, Japanese people “seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia.” She added: “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.”
The prize’s latest result lands in a year when the field was open to long-form fiction and short-story collections translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026. For Yáng, who writes essays, manga and video game scripts, and for King, whose debut novel Weeb is forthcoming, the award turns a formally slippery, deeply historical novel into a new international landmark. It also closes a gap in the prize’s history, with previous winners including Han Kang for The Vegetarian and Olga Tokarczuk for Flights.
