Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi 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.”
