Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and her translator Lin King have won the 2026 International Booker prize for the historical novel Taiwan Travelogue, the first book originally written in Mandarin to take the £50,000 award. At the ceremony at Tate Modern on Tuesday night, Yáng said: "Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics. But I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown."
Set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Taiwan, the novel is presented as a translation of a rediscovered travel memoir, following a Japanese novelist on a government-sponsored culinary trip and her relationship with an enigmatic Taiwanese interpreter. Each chapter is named after a Taiwanese delicacy. The 41-year-old writer said she wanted to explore the identity crisis facing Taiwanese people: "Some of us believe ourselves to be Chinese and then others believe that we are Taiwanese... As Taiwanese people, we need to ask ourselves now – do we want to go back to being colonised?"
The book's themes of national identity and colonialism feel timely, with Taiwan claimed by Beijing as part of China and Donald Trump last week warning the island against declaring independence. The judging chair, Natasha Brown, described the novel's "intriguing metafictional layer", created through fictional translators' notes and competing narrative voices. Yáng's pen name means "twins", a tribute to her late twin sister who helped research the novel's historical background before her death.
Taiwan Travelogue has already won the US National Book Award for translated literature. Its translator, Lin King, said the book's demanding structure had been embraced by readers: "I appreciate that it's a really hard book to read... It's been really heartening to see people willing to put in the work."
At its core, the novel is a love story that explores how power imbalances affect relationships. "It's a story about love, but it is also a story about how love cannot overcome power dynamics," Yáng said. Both she and King see art as inseparable from politics, with King drawing parallels between Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Taiwan's geopolitical precarity.
