'Taiwan Travelogue' wins the 2026 International Booker Prize

Book News & Features 'Taiwan Travelogue' wins the 2026 International Booker Prize May 19, 20265:31 PM ET By  Ivy Buck Taiwan Travelogue author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, left, and translator Lin King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the International Booker Prize. They are pictured above in London on Monday. Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize, awarded each year to the best work of fiction translated into English. It's the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker. Yang and translator Lin King are also the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. They will split the £50,000 award — around $67,000. Judges describe Taiwan Travelogue, which won the 2024 National Book Award for translated literature, as a "captivating, slyly sophisticated" book. The novel presents as a rediscovered (and fictional) travel memoir from 1930s Japan-occupied Taiwan, as its two main characters embark together on a culinary tour across Taiwan. "Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double feat," wrote Natasha Brown, chair of judges, said in a press release. "It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel." Yang conceived the novel with a comparative perspective in mind: Sponsor Message "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," she said in an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation. "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." In the same interview, Taiwan Travelogue's translator Lin King said she "personally dislike[s] histor...