Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize, awarded each year to the best work of fiction translated into English. It's 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 prize, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. They will split the £50,000 award — around $67,000.
Judges describe Taiwan Travelogue, which won the 2024 National Book Award for translated literature, as a "captivating, slyly sophisticated" book. The novel presents as a rediscovered (and fictional) travel memoir from 1930s Japan-occupied Taiwan, as its two main characters embark together on a culinary tour across Taiwan.
"Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double feat," wrote Natasha Brown, chair of judges, said in a press release. "It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel."
Yang conceived the novel with a comparative perspective in mind:
"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 said in an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation. "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 same interview, Taiwan Travelogue's translator Lin King said she "personally dislike[s] historical fiction that is strictly miserable."
Taiwan Travelogue, she said, reflects the breadth of "humour, good food, movies, school, petty fights, and romance" that remains during difficult periods in history. And as a queer historical romance, the novel also functions as a window into a largely-hidden past — one where, as King said, characters' identities and experiences are not "bulldozed over by their suffering."
Booker judges selected Taiwan Travelogue as the winner out of 128 books submitted by publishers, six of which were 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 Remains by Rene Karabash.
Each shortlisted author and translator will receive £5,000 from the prize committee to be split between them.
Last year's International Booker Prize went to Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories from author Banu Mushtaq about the lives of girls and women in south Indian Muslim communities.
Copyright 2026 NPR
