Food, forbidden love and the weight of the empire carry ‘Taiwan Travelogue’ to the International Booker Prize 2026

A Japanese novelist arrives in Taiwan in 1938 on a government-sponsored culinary tour. She brings with her a Taiwanese interpreter named Chizuru. By the end of the trip, she is in love with her.

That is the premise of Taiwan Travelogue, which on Tuesday evening was awarded the International Booker Prize at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London. Written by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated into English by Taiwanese-American Lin King, it is the first book originally written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prize. The £50,000 award is split equally between author and translator.

Yáng and King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners in the prize's ten-year history. Yáng also writes manga and video game scripts. King broke what she calls countless translation rules to bring the work into English, taking a maximalist approach that her editor at Graywolf Press trusted her to run with.

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The romance at the centre of the book is not straightforward. Aoyama, the Japanese writer, finds herself drawn to Chizuru, who is charming and fluent but keeps her distance, resisting all efforts to see past her professional composure. Taiwan in 1938 is a Japanese colony, and the gap between the two women is not just personal — it is political. The book does not let its characters, or its readers, forget this.

Yáng has said that while both Korea and Taiwan were once under Japanese rule, the two countries carry that history differently. Koreans tend to feel uniformly resentful of that period, she observed, whereas Taiwanese people hold a far more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia. That tension runs through every page of the novel.

The book's form is also rather unusual. The story is told as a translation of a rediscovered memoir, with fictional footnotes and afterwords written by its own characters sitting alongside real ones by King. It is a story that keeps drawing attention to its own construction, asking what it means to translate not just language but history and memory.

King has said she dislikes historical fiction that is relentlessly bleak, arguing that even in the hardest times people find humour, food, small pleasures and each other. Taiwan Travelogue holds to that. It carries the weight of colonial occupation without being flattened by it.

Judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown said the book succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel. Before Tuesday's prize, King's translation had already won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature. The original Mandarin Chinese text won Taiwan's highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award, making Taiwan Travelogue the rare novel that arrived at the Booker already garlanded, and left with one more reason to be read.