Taiwan Travelogue writer Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, left, and translator Lin King are the primary Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the Worldwide Booker Prize. They’re pictured above in London on Monday.
Adrian Dennis/AFP through Getty Pictures
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Adrian Dennis/AFP through Getty Pictures
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue has gained the 2026 Worldwide Booker Prize, awarded annually to one of the best work of fiction translated into English. It is the primary work translated from Mandarin Chinese language to win the Worldwide Booker.
Yang and translator Lin King are additionally the primary Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this yr. They are going to cut up the £50,000 award — round $67,000.
Judges describe Taiwan Travelogue, which gained the 2024 Nationwide E-book Award for translated literature, as a “captivating, slyly sophisticated” guide. The novel presents as a rediscovered (and fictional) journey memoir from Nineteen Thirties Japan-occupied Taiwan, as its two most important characters embark collectively on a culinary tour throughout Taiwan.
“Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double feat,” wrote Natasha Brown, chair of judges, stated in a press launch. “It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.”
Yang conceived the novel with a comparative perspective in thoughts:
“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,” she stated in an interview with the Booker Prize Basis. “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.”
In the identical interview, Taiwan Travelogue‘s translator Lin King stated she “personally dislike[s] historical fiction that is strictly miserable.”
Taiwan Travelogue, she stated, displays the breadth of “humour, good food, movies, school, petty fights, and romance” that continues to be throughout tough intervals in historical past. And as a queer historic romance, the novel additionally capabilities as a window right into a largely-hidden previous — one the place, as King stated, characters’ identities and experiences are usually not “bulldozed over by their suffering.”
Booker judges chosen Taiwan Travelogue because the winner out of 128 books submitted by publishers, six of which have been shortlisted.
Titles shortlisted for the prize included Shida Bazyar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, Ana Paula Maia’s ‘s On Earth As It Is Beneath, Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, The Director by Daniel Kehlmann and She Who Stays by Rene Karabash.
Every shortlisted writer and translator will obtain £5,000 from the prize committee to be cut up between them.
Final yr’s Worldwide Booker Prize went to Coronary heart Lamp, a set of brief tales from writer Banu Mushtaq in regards to the lives of women and girls in south Indian Muslim communities.
