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 Photographs
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Adrian Dennis/AFP through Getty Photographs
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue has received the 2026 Worldwide Booker Prize, awarded annually to the very 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 break up the £50,000 award — round $67,000.
Judges describe Taiwan Travelogue, which received the 2024 Nationwide Guide Award for translated literature, as a “charming, slyly refined” guide. The novel presents as a rediscovered (and fictional) journey memoir from Thirties Japan-occupied Taiwan, as its two most important characters embark collectively on a culinary tour throughout Taiwan.
“Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an unbelievable double feat,” wrote Natasha Brown, chair of judges, mentioned in a press launch. “It succeeds as each a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.”
Yang conceived the novel with a comparative perspective in thoughts:
“Each Korea and Taiwan had been as soon as colonies of the Japanese Empire, however Koreans appear to really feel uniformly resentful of that historical past, whereas Taiwanese folks regard it with a way more conflicted mixture of distaste and nostalgia,” she mentioned in an interview with the Booker Prize Basis. “I wished to untangle the complicated circumstances that Taiwan’s folks confronted previously, and to discover what sort of future we should try towards.”
In the identical interview, Taiwan Travelogue‘s translator Lin King mentioned she “personally dislike[s] historic fiction that’s strictly depressing.”
Taiwan Travelogue, she mentioned, displays the breadth of “humour, good meals, motion pictures, college, petty fights, and romance” that is still throughout tough intervals in historical past. And as a queer historic romance, the novel additionally features as a window right into a largely-hidden previous — one the place, as King mentioned, characters’ identities and experiences aren’t “bulldozed over by their struggling.”
Booker judges chosen Taiwan Travelogue because the winner out of 128 books submitted by publishers, six of which had 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 break up between them.
Final yr’s Worldwide Booker Prize went to Coronary heart Lamp, a group of quick tales from writer Banu Mushtaq concerning the lives of women and girls in south Indian Muslim communities.
