Yáng Shuāng-zǐ has won the 2026 International Booker Prize for her novel Taiwan Travelogue, sharing the £50,000 award with translator Lin King. The ceremony took place at Tate Modern on Tuesday night, where Yáng used her acceptance speech to address the political themes central to her work.
“Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics,” Yáng said. “But I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown.” Speaking the following morning, she expanded on the identity crisis facing Taiwanese people. “As Taiwanese people, we need to ask ourselves now – do we want to go back to being colonised? Do we want to have to live like that again? Be second-class citizens in our own land? I refuse.”
Taiwan Travelogue is the first book originally written in Mandarin to win the prize. Presented as a rediscovered travel memoir from 1938, the novel follows Japanese novelist Aoyama on a government-sponsored culinary tour of Taiwan, where she becomes infatuated with an enigmatic Taiwanese interpreter named Chizuru. Each chapter is named after a Taiwanese delicacy, creating what the author describes as a synaesthesia of taste, texture and longing.
The novel’s structural playfulness is central to its appeal. When first published in Mandarin in 2020, some readers believed it was a genuine colonial-era text. In English, Lin King preserved and expanded the footnotes and competing narrative voices, creating what International Booker judging chair Natasha Brown called an “intriguing metafictional layer”. King noted that readers have been willing to engage with the book’s complexity despite concerns about divided attention spans.
Yáng adopted the pen name Shuāng-zǐ, meaning “twins”, as a tribute to her late twin sister, who helped research the novel’s historical background. The book has already won the National Book Award for translated literature in the US in 2024. Yáng described the International Booker win as “surreal”.
