“Taiwan Travelogue,” a love story presented as a rediscovered travelogue from 1930s Taiwan, on Tuesday won the International Booker Prize, the major award for fiction translated into English.
The novel, written by Yang Shuang-zi and translated by Lin King, is the first book originally written in Mandarin to win the prize, as well as the first by a Taiwanese author.
The award, which is presented in the United Kingdom, comes with 50,000 pounds, about $67,000, split equally between author and translator.
The novel opens in 1938, when Japan occupied Taiwan. A young Japanese novelist arrives on the island hoping to experience life like a local, and particularly to eat her way through all of Taiwan’s culinary specialties. Soon, she falls for her female translator, but struggles to overcome the divide between colonized and colonizer.
Natasha Brown, an author and the chair of this year’s prize jury, said in a news conference that the novel “pulls off an incredible double feat: It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive post-colonial novel.”
“Taiwan Travelogue” features several afterwords and numerous footnotes written by both fake and real translators. Although the book is “in some ways a love letter to translation,” Brown insisted that wasn’t the reason the jury selected it ahead of five other nominated titles. Aside from its literary flourishes, the novel is “a completely engrossing, completely delicious love story,” Brown said.
Originally awarded to an author for an entire body of work, the International Booker Prize has since 2016 gone to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland during the previous 12 months. Recent winners have included David Diop’s “At Night All Blood Is Black,” translated by Anna Moschovakis, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Kairos,” translated by Michael Hofmann.
The other books shortlisted this year were “The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin; “The Witch,” by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump; “On Earth As It Is Beneath,” by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan; “The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran,” by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin; and “She Who Remains,” by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel.
Yang is a writer of manga and video game scripts as well as novels. In a recent interview for the Booker Prize’s website, Yang said she began writing the novel with a desire to untangle Taiwan’s complex relationship with Japanese colonialism, which she called a “conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia.”
Researching its central themes of travel and food “changed my life in two obvious ways: My savings went down; my weight went up,” Yang added.
Before Tuesday’s ceremony, held at the Tate Modern art museum in London, “Taiwan Travelogue” was already one of the most acclaimed books among this year’s nominees. When it was published in Mandarin in 2020, it won a Golden Tripod award, one of Taiwan’s major literary honors. The English-language translation published in the United States in 2024 won that year’s National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Critics have also lauded the novel. Ángel Gurría-Quintana, writing in The Financial Times, called it a “rich and heady” meditation on language and longing.
Shahnaz Habib, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that “Taiwan Travelogue” was “a delightfully slippery novel about how power shapes relationships, and what travel reveals and conceals.” It was, Habib added, a “virtuosic performance of literary polyphony.”
After her name was announced on Tuesday, Yang took to the stage, her hands covered in too much dessert to unfold her notes. She then gave an impassioned speech about the meaning of literature and its importance to Taiwan, with King translating.
“Literature has never ceded ground, nor given up on dialogue between people,” Yang said. “The century-old inquiries in Taiwan’s literature are in fact the century-old pursuit of freedom and equality by Taiwan’s people.”
