LONDON (AP) — Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King won the International Booker Prize on Tuesday for “Taiwan Travelogue,” a historical romance set in Japan-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s.It is the first novel written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious prize for fiction translated into English.British novelist Natasha Brown, who chaired the judging panel, called it a “captivating, wryly sophisticated” book that plays with themes of language and power and offers the reader surprises along the way.The novel purports to be a travel memoir by a Japanese novelist on a culinary tour of Taiwan and charts the — fictional — writer’s complex relationship with her local interpreter.Brown said the book explores class and colonialism, asking: “Can love overcome a power imbalance?” She said it “pulls off an incredible double act: It succeeds both as a romance and as an incisive postcolonial novel.”
Yáng, who writes fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, has said she “wanted to untangle the complex circumstances” of Taiwan’s time as a Japanese colony.“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,” she told the Booker Prizes website.
