Cover art for Taiwan Travelogue, the 2026 International Booker Prize-winning novel by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King.
On the evening of May 19, 2026, at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London, a Taiwanese novel about a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese interpreter falling in love during a colonial culinary tour in the 1930s was named the winner of the International Booker Prize.
Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated from Mandarin Chinese into English by Lin King, is the first book originally written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prize.
Taiwan Travelogue presents itself as a rediscovered travel memoir: a fictional document supposedly written in the 1930s by a Japanese author named Aoyama, who has arrived in Japanese-occupied Taiwan on a government-sponsored culinary tour.
Her guide and interpreter is a Taiwanese woman named Chizuru; enchanting, professionally guarded, impossible to know fully. The two women navigate the island together, sampling regional cuisines, visiting colonial sites, and moving through a landscape that is both beautiful and colonised.
