Taiwan Travelogue has won the International Booker Prize 2026, at a ceremony held at Tate Modern in London.
The £50,000 prize is split 50:50 between author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King, giving each writer equal recognition.
Taiwan Travelogue is the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker Prize. The winning author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize.
Announcing the winner, chair of the 2026 judges Natasha Brown said, “Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double feat: it succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel. As judges, we’ve enjoyed rich discussions about the many layers of this book. It’s a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel.”
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ – the author
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a Taiwanese writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism. Taiwan Travelogue is her first book to be translated into English. As well as the International Booker Prize 2026, the novel won the National Book Award for Literature in Translation in 2024 and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. It has been published or is forthcoming in numerous languages including Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, and Greek.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ said, “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. Using a contemporary Taiwanese lens, 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.
“Sometime in the second half of 2017, I came up with an outline and wrote the first chapter. I didn’t formally begin working on the project until 18 February, 2019, and completed the first draft on 20 August of the same year. Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up.”
Lin King – the translator
Lin King is a Taiwanese-American writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review and Joyland, among others, and she has received the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her translations include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin, as well as Taiwan Travelogue. Her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming from Holt.
Lin King said, “I personally dislike historical fiction that is strictly miserable. These stories ring to me as untrue, because no matter how difficult times are, I believe that humans always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love.
“Were Taiwan’s peoples oppressed and mistreated under Japanese rule? Yes, but that does not mean their identities and personalities were bulldozed over by their suffering. There was still humor, good food, movies, school, petty fights, and romance. To suggest otherwise is to reduce a culture to its trauma. That’s what I appreciate about Taiwan Travelogue.
“I worked very closely with my editor at Graywolf [the book’s US publisher], Yuka Igarashi, who trusted me to run wild with a complex mix of languages, notations, and footnotes. We took a maximalist approach, broke countless translation “rules”, and ended up with an experimental, multilayered work that we can be proud of.”
