Taiwan Travelogue Wins International Booker Prize

Why this is here: The novel is set during a period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule, a detail woven into the characters’ experiences with food, love, and cultural identity.

Yang Shuang-zi and Lin King won the International Booker Prize for their novel Taiwan Travelogue, the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to receive the award. The book presents a fictional travel memoir from the 1930s, following a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese translator as they journey across Taiwan under Japanese rule.

The novel explores themes of love, colonial history, and cultural power dynamics through detailed descriptions of food and travel. Many readers initially believed the book was a genuine historical text when it was first published in 2020, due to its elaborate framing and fictional footnotes.

Yang previously won Taiwan’s Golden Tripod Award for the original Mandarin version in 2021, while Lin King’s English translation received the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024. The judges highlighted the importance of translation in bringing the story to a wider audience, and the £50,000 prize will be shared equally between author and translator. Further research may reveal how this award impacts readership of translated works.