Everything you need to know about Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026
Mohan Gulrajani
Everything you need to know about Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026
As the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize is announced, here’s the lowdown on the triumphant book, its author and translator
Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi (right) poses with her book "Taiwan Travelogue", along with Lin King, the translator of the English version.
Why did Taiwan Travelogue win?
Natasha Brown, Chair of judges, said:
‘Can love overcome a power imbalance? Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, teases out the nuances of this question against a backdrop of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule.
‘Taiwan Travelogue follows Aoyama, a well-meaning author from Japan, and her Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, on a government-sponsored tour of Taiwan. From their first meeting, sparks fly between the two women. The power dynamics inherent to their burgeoning relationship, however, prove difficult to navigate. Chizuru is a cipher: enchanting, yet unknowable. She resists all of Aoyama’s efforts to pierce her carefully-constructed mask of professionalism.
‘This book doesn’t shy away from the complexities (both real and fictional) of its journey into the English language. Instead, it uses the hallmarks of a more traditional text – introductions, footnotes, afterwords – to wrap an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story. Lin King’s deft translation perfectly conveys the nuances of the novel’s narrative voices.
‘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.’
Taiwan Travelogue
What is Taiwan Travelogue about?
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.
It’s May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
Soon a Taiwanese woman – who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name – is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook.
Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the ‘something’ is.
Taiwan Travelogue was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award. The novel unearths lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
Who are Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King?
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.
Lin King is a Taiwanese and 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.
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 and American winners of the prize.
Taiwan Travelogue author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King at the International Booker Prize 2026 winner ceremony
© David Parry for Booker Prize Foundation
What have Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King said about Taiwan Travelogue?
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ:
‘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:
‘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 humour, 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.’
What have the critics said about Taiwan Travelogue?
Talya Zax, The Atlantic
‘Layers of commentary serve to make the story’s emotional center more difficult to access, and more fulfilling once you’ve earned it… A straightforward story surrounded by many twisting layers of mystery.’
Marcie Geffner, Washington Independent Review of Books
‘In the end, Taiwan Travelogue is much more than a feast for foodies or a tale for armchair travelers. It’s a journey into the hearts of two unforgettable women who may or may not be able to reconcile friendship, perhaps even love, with the enormous gap in their social status and the vast cultural differences of their lives.’
Lauren Yu-Ting Bo, Words Without Borders
‘Taiwan Travelogue is a fearless record of a complicated time in Taiwan’s history. It not only captures the physical details of the period of Japanese colonization—“leather oxfords and wooden geta,” majolica tiles, and an overall merging of Chinese, Japanese, Indigenous, and Western cultures—but also the difficult social experiences of the people who lived through it.’
Nitika Francis, The Hindu
‘Their dynamic poses intriguing questions – can a Mainlander and an Islander be friends? Can you love someone whose stature and upbringing forbid them from viewing you as an equal? Do they only love the virtuosity their kindness reflects on them? Taiwan Travelogue does not set out to answer these questions, but rather to reveal them, while paying homage to Taiwan’s ever-growing cultural amalgam.’
Eva Cheuk Yin Li, The Conversation
‘Taiwan Travelogue’s meta-fictional architecture is quietly audacious. Yáng frames the narrative through a fictional author, a fictional translator and their respective silences, making the unreliable narrator not merely a device but a structural argument about whose knowledge counts and whose remains obstructed.
‘What makes the book genuinely pleasurable, however, is its treatment of intimacy between the two women. The queer undertow is rendered through the minute economies of shared meals and unfinished sentences, through which Yáng smuggles the most profound questions about desire, friendship and colonial entitlement into the everyday.’
Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
‘As rich and heady as some of the dishes that Chi-chan prepares for Aoyama, Taiwan Travelogue is a multi-layered meditation on language and longing, and on the many ways in which we travel only to arrive where we started.’
How does the book begin?
“Hold on. What’s going on here?”
I couldn’t help but voice the thought out loud.
For, in that moment, I seemed to have been transported back into the midst of Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu’s Magic Troupe.
I’d crossed paths with Tenkatsu’s troupe long ago, before I’d started high school. They had been on tour, and on the day they arrived in Nagasaki, my aunt Kikuko and I happened upon the opening parade.
The procession comprised a majestic formation of rickshaws, rows and rows of them with no end in sight—enough to rival an army regiment. The band rode at the frontmost rickshaws, performing with remarkable gusto; after them came the women magicians, beaming and waving at the crowd in exquisite maquillage; they were followed by the male magicians in top hats. Other troupe members went on foot, encircling the rickshaws and ushering them along. They held up long poles with brightly colored flags—streaks of crimson, white, violet, and azure that were no less commanding than the band’s spirited music. My chest thrummed and lifted, as though something had been strung from my navel all the way up into the sky.
And here I was, decades later, on the outpost island of Taiwan, reliving this old reverie. It was May, in the thirteenth year of Shōwa…
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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