Taiwan Travelogue

🏆 WINNER — International Booker Prize 2026. Announced at Tate Modern, London on 19 May 2026. The first book translated from Mandarin Chinese ever to win.

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026. Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. A dazzling, metafictional novel of food, friendship, language, and empire in 1938 Taiwan — from one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Taiwanese literature.

It is 1938, and Taiwan is under Japanese colonial rule. Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese novelist commissioned to tour the island, arrives by ship in Taichung and is paired with a Taiwanese interpreter named Chizuru — a quietly brilliant young woman whose Mandarin, Japanese, and Taiwanese Hokkien open doors that Chizuko, alone, could never enter.

Together, they travel the length of the colony, eating their way through pineapple cakes, beef noodle soup, taro buns, rice porridge, and every street-stall delicacy in between. As Chizuko's appetite for Taiwan grows, so does her dependence on Chizuru — and so do the silences, mistranslations, and gentle refusals at the heart of their friendship.

Framed as a rediscovered travelogue annotated by its present-day translator, Taiwan Travelogue is a novel about colonialism written in the most disarming possible register: warm, hungry, funny, and deeply human. A book about translation that is itself a marvel of translation.

Acclaim

• 🏆 Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026
• Winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature
• The first book translated from Mandarin Chinese ever to win the International Booker Prize
• The first Taiwanese author and Taiwanese-American translator to win the prize

From the chair of judges

“Can love overcome a power imbalance? Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, teases out the nuances of this question against a backdrop of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule.”

— Natasha Brown, Chair of the 2026 International Booker Prize judges

About the author and translator

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (楊双子) is the pen name of one of Taiwan's most acclaimed contemporary novelists, known for fiction that explores Taiwanese history, queer identity, and the legacy of Japanese colonial rule. Taiwan Travelogue is her English-language debut — and the first novel ever translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker Prize.

Lin King is a Taiwanese-American writer and translator working from Chinese and Japanese. Her translation of Taiwan Travelogue won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2026 International Booker Prize — making her the first Taiwanese-American translator to receive the award.

Perfect for readers of

Han Kang, Yoko Ogawa, Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station, Ge Fei, and anyone drawn to literary fiction in translation, food writing, and stories of empire and friendship.