2026 International Booker Prize goes to ‘Taiwan Travelogue’ : NPR
Taiwan travel diary author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, left, and translator Lin King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the International Booker Prize. They are pictured above in London on Monday.
Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images
Yáng Shuang-zǐ Taiwan travel diary won the 2026 International Booker Prize, awarded annually to the best work of fiction translated into English. It is the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker.
Yang and translator Lin King are also the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the award, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. They will split the £50,000 reward, or about $67,000.
The judges describe Taiwan travel diarywhich won the 2024 National Book Award for translated literature, as a “captivating and deviously sophisticated” book. The novel presents itself as a rediscovered (and fictionalized) travelogue about Japanese-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s, as its two main characters embark on a culinary tour through Taiwan together.
“Taiwan travel diary achieves an incredible dual feat,” wrote Natasha Brown, president of the jury, in a press release. “It succeeds both as a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.”
Yang conceived the novel with a comparative perspective in mind:
“Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese Empire, but Koreans seem to feel a uniform resentment of that history, while Taiwanese view it with a much more conflicted mix of disgust and nostalgia,” she said in an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation. “I wanted to unravel the complex circumstances that the people of Taiwan have faced in the past and explore the kind of future we should strive for.”
In the same interview, Taiwan travel diaryLin King’s translator said that she “personally doesn’t like[s] strictly miserable historical fiction. »
Taiwan travel diaryshe says, reflects the extent of “humor, good food, movies, school, little fights and romance” that survives during difficult times in history. And as a queer historical novel, the novel also functions as a window into a largely hidden past—a past where, as King said, the characters’ identities and experiences are not “bulldozed by their suffering.”
Booker judges selected Taiwan travel diary as the winner among 128 books submitted by publishers, six of which were shortlisted.
Among the titles shortlisted for the award was that of Shida Bazyar The nights are calm in Tehran, That of Ana Paula Maia On Earth as below, Marie NDiaye The witch, the director by Daniel Kehlmann and The one who remains by René Karabach.
Each shortlisted author and translator will receive £5,000 from the prize committee, to be shared between them.
Last year the International Booker Prize was awarded to Heart Lampa collection of short stories by author Banu Mushtaq on the lives of girls and women from Muslim communities in South India.
