Taiwanese author Yáng Shuang-zi and her Taiwanese-American translator Lin King were awarded this year’s International Booker Prize for Taiwan Travelogue at a ceremony in the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern this evening. They share the £50,000 prize equally. “Can love overcome a power imbalance?” Natasha Brown, chair of the judges, asked. “Taiwan Travelogue teases out the nuances of this question against a backdrop of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule.“It 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.”It is the first translation from Mandarin Chinese to win in the prize’s 10-year history. The winning publisher is And Other Stories, a small Sheffield-based publisher, which also won last year with Heat Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. Yáng Shuang-zi is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts and literary criticism. She was awarded Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award, for the original Mandarin Chinese version of Taiwan Travelogue. Lin King’s English-language translation of Taiwan Travelogue – the first of Yáng’s books to be translated into English – won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024 and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. King’s own debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming and she has received the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.Yáng Shuang-zi in an interview for the Booker Prize website said: “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. “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 said: “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.”