TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — “Taiwan Travelogue” by Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子) has won the 2026 International Booker Prize for its English translation, marking the first time a Mandarin-language work has taken the honor.
The award recognizes fiction translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. Taiwanese American translator Lin King (金翎) brought the novel to English readers, according to CNA and The Booker Prizes.
Set in 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, a train moves along the main railway carrying wartime supplies. Two young women sit side by side in a carriage, one a Japanese aristocrat in a Western dress and the other a Taiwanese woman in modest clothing, according to BBC.
They speak in Japanese, appearing close yet separated by the divide between colonizer and colonized. The author and her interpreter travel across the country on a culinary journey that gradually becomes more intimate.
What begins as a travelogue shifts into emotional terrain. As the two women grow closer, their relationship becomes inseparable from the novel’s exploration of colonialism, class, power, and love.
First published in Mandarin in 2020, the book initially drew attention for its layered, metafictional structure. Presented as a translated rediscovered memoir, it led some readers to believe it was based on an authentic historical Japanese text.
International Booker Prize Chair of judges Natasha Brown highlighted that the novel “doesn’t shy away from the complexities — both real and fictional — of its journey into the English language.” She noted its use of introductions, footnotes, and afterwords to build a metafictional frame around a central love story, asking: “Can love overcome a power imbalance?”
Yang said the novel was shaped in part by the differing ways Taiwan and South Korea relate to the legacy of Japanese colonial rule, and by her attempt to approach Taiwan’s past through a contemporary lens. A lens that looks not only backward, but forward.
In her acceptance speech, Yang described literature and art as inseparable from the social ground on which they emerge. She said Taiwanese literature has long asked the same central question: what future do the people of Taiwan envision for themselves and for their country?
Taiwan Travelogue, she added, is part of that ongoing conversation.
Rather than something static, she described literature as a slow but persistent force, quiet in form yet able to move across time and language through translation. Closing her remarks, Yang framed the century-long question in Taiwanese literature as tied to the pursuit of freedom and equality and said it is a privilege to represent Taiwan.
The novel uses food as its structural spine, with each of its 12 chapters named after a dish the two protagonists encounter, ranging from Taiwanese snacks and street food to banquet cuisine and desserts.
Yang said this culinary structure mirrors the narrative arc, tracking shifts in intimacy and emotional distance. Early in the novel, Taiwanese interpreter Wang Chien-ho (王千鶴) prepares a bowl of moroheiya soup for Japanese writer Aoyama Chizuko, marking a quiet deepening of trust between them.
The soup is a central Taiwan dish made from young jute leaves, pounded and simmered into a broth with a slightly bitter, lingering sweetness. Its origins trace back to the Japanese colonial period, when jute was widely cultivated to produce sacks for transporting rice and sugar, with discarded leaves later repurposed into food.
Yang described it as “a product of local ingenuity and everyday life, a byproduct of byproducts which carries the imprint of poverty,” linking it to Wang's background and her tentative opening toward mutual understanding.
Another dish, minced pork rice, highlights a quieter cultural divide at the table. Deeply embedded in Taiwanese daily life, it is made from assorted cuts of pork and seasoned with soy sauce.
Yang noted that in historical Japanese dietary practice, land-based animal meat was often avoided, creating a cultural contrast with Taiwanese food traditions. In the novel, when Wang cooks the dish for Aoyama, the dish becomes more than a meal.
It also functions as an invitation into Taiwanese culture, raising the question of whether that invitation can cross inherited boundaries of taste, class, and perception, and whether Aoyama is willing to step into her world. The novel closes on sweet bean shaved ice with a hint of plum-like sourness, as the conflict and inability to understand between the two women surface, leaving an emotional impact that is quiet but devastating.
