Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ wins International Booker Prize 2026
Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ has won the International Booker Prize 2026 for Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, with the novel being the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the award.
The accolade marks And Other Stories’ second win in a row after Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada, by Deepa Bhasthi won in 2025. The publisher was also recently crowned Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards 2026.
Presented as the translation of a rediscovered (fictional) travel memoir, Taiwan Travelogue follows a Japanese novelist with a “monstrous appetite” on a culinary tour through Japanese-occupied Taiwan, accompanied by a local interpreter who shares her passion for food. The original Mandarin Chinese publication was first published in 2020, causing a stir with some readers who thought it was a real translation of a 1930s Japanese text.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts and literary criticism. She was awarded Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award, for the original Mandarin Chinese version of Taiwan Travelogue and Lin King’s English-language translation of the novel – the first of Yáng’s books to be translated into English. She also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024 and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize.
King has also been recognised for her fiction writing: she has received the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming.
Despite only publishing in the UK in March 2026, Taiwan Travelogue was the second-bestselling title on the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist. The book saw a 65% sales uplift week-on-week following the shortlist announcement, according to the prize. To date, rights have been sold in a total of 23 territories, ranging from Serbia to Indonesia and Brazil to Ukraine.
In a press briefing ahead of the award ceremony in London on 19th May, chair of the judges Natasha Brown said the judges were taken with the Taiwan Travelogue’s “many, many layers” and the way it “pulls off [the] incredible double act” of being "both a romance and an incisive post-colonial novel”, describing it as a “love-letter to translation” but also a “completely engrossing, delicious love story”, a “book that surprises and perhaps isn’t what it seems like on the surface”.
She said: “‘This book doesn’t shy away from the complexities, both real and fictional, of its journey into the English language. Instead, it uses the hallmarks of a more traditional text – introductions, footnotes, afterwords – to wrap an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story. Lin King’s deft translation perfectly conveys the nuances of the novel’s narrative voices […] As judges, we’ve enjoyed rich discussions about the many layers of this book. It’s a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel.”
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The winning book was announced by Brown at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
Each also received a trophy, presented by Brown, who was joined on this year’s judging panel by writer, broadcaster and Oxford University professor of mathematics Marcus du Sautoy; International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Sophie Hughes; writer, Lolwe editor and bookseller Troy Onyango; and award-winning novelist and columnist Nilanjana S Roy.
Gaby Wood, CEO of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “The judges’ meeting to decide the winner was inspiring. They had read each of the shortlisted books at least three times and they described them in turn: how the books had changed each time they read them, how aspects of them shifted as a result of the judging discussions themselves. It was a wonderful act of collective reading, in which every one of the shortlisted books, each a strong contender for the prize, was found to have acquired depth.
“Eventually, one rose to the top: inventive, playful, witty and profound, Taiwan Travelogue is a love story that had the judges’ hearts as well as their minds. I look forward to witnessing from afar the ongoing travels of this remarkable book."
In a previous interview for the Booker Prizes website, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ said: “Both Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese Empire, but Koreans seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia. 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. 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.”
Also in an interview for the Booker Prizes website, Lin King said: “I personally dislike historical fiction that is strictly miserable. These stories ring to me as untrue, because no matter how difficult times are, I believe that humans always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love. Were Taiwan’s peoples oppressed and mistreated under Japanese rule? Yes, but that does not mean their identities and personalities were bulldozed by their suffering. There was still humour, good food, movies, school, petty fights and romance. To suggest otherwise is to reduce a culture to its trauma. That’s what I appreciate about Taiwan Travelogue.”
