International Booker Prize 2026 announced, Taiwan Travelogue wins the prize
On May 19, 2026 A story about Taiwanese food and love between two women won the International Booker Prize 2026. Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāng-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, is experimental in form becoming the first novel translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious award.
It contains a scholarly foreword, afterwords, fictional footnotes and real translator’s notes. Taiwan Travelogue, written by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi and Taiwanese-American translator Lin King, follows two women on their culinary tour across Taiwan in the 1930s, when the island was under Japanese rule.
Taiwan Travelogue centres on a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, who is on a government-sponsored tour of Taiwan with a Taiwanese translator, O Chizuru, whom she falls in love with. Through their lens, the novel explores issues of love, culture, colonial history and power.
Taiwan Travelogue had already won several accolades. Yang, 41, also writes essays, manga and video game scripts. Her original Mandarin Chinese version of the novel won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award in 2021. Lin King’s English translation version won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024.
