'Taiwan Travelogue' Becomes First Mandarin-Language Novel to Win the International Booker Prize, as Yang Shuang-zi and Lin King Split £50,000 Award

"Taiwan Travelogue," a slim, layered novel by the Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi rendered into English by the Taiwanese-American translator Lin King, won the 2026 International Booker Prize on Monday night, becoming the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to take the £50,000 prize in the award's 10-year history. The two women will split the cash equally — a tradition the Booker Foundation introduced in 2016 to formally recognize the translator's role — and the announcement was made at a ceremony at London's Tate Modern hosted by chair of judges Natasha Brown.

Set in the Japanese colonial period of the late 1930s, "Taiwan Travelogue" is framed as the recently rediscovered notebooks of Aoyama Chizuko, a fictional Japanese travel writer commissioned by her Tokyo publisher to tour Taiwan and write a series of dispatches. Chizuko hires a young Taiwanese woman, Chizuru, as her interpreter and companion; what follows is part culinary travel diary, part anti-colonial bildungsroman, and part queer love story complicated by the impossibility of equality between colonizer and colonized. "Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double feat," Brown said in announcing the winner. "It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel — and Lin King's translation captures every shade of irony in the original."

The novel was first published in traditional Chinese in Taiwan in 2020 under the pen name Yang Shuang-zi, which the author uses to honor a twin sister who died young. King's English translation came out in the United States in late 2024 from Graywolf Press and immediately won that year's National Book Award for translated literature and Asia Society's inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. The International Booker win, judges said, marks an unusual sweep across three of the English-speaking literary world's top translation honors.

Yang, speaking through King at the ceremony, said the win was "a recognition for Taiwan, for all the languages and histories that have been silenced inside its archives, and for every translator who has carried Taiwanese voices into the world." King added that she had translated the novel "in deliberate dialogue" with Taiwan's complicated political moment, noting that the People's Republic of China continues to claim the self-governing democratic island as its own and has banned the novel from sale on the mainland. "Awarding this book this year is not a political statement," King said. "But the act of reading it might be."

The other shortlisted titles were "The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran" by the Iranian-German author Shida Bazyar; "On Earth As It Is Beneath" by Brazil's Ana Paula Maia; Marie NDiaye's "The Witch," translated from the French; "The Director" by the Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann; and "She Who Remains" by the Bulgarian-born British author Rene Karabash. The shortlisted authors and translators each received £2,500. Booker judges considered 128 books submitted by 89 publishers — a record submission count, the foundation said, since the prize was reconstituted in its current form in 2016.