Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and her English translator Lin King have received the 2026 International Booker Prize for the novel Taiwan Travelogue, the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the award in its ten-year history and the first by a Taiwanese writer.
The judges described the book as “a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel” that “pulls off an incredible double feat: it succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” According to reports, the story introduces Australian readers to a Taiwan many have never encountered, moving beyond the geopolitical lens often applied in the country.
The novel centers on a Japanese woman novelist who arrives in 1930s colonial Taiwan and hires a local interpreter named Chi-chan. Chi-chan cooks for her, translates, and arranges travel across the island while maintaining a careful distance. The power imbalance plays out through meals, conversations, and small acts of hospitality rather than dramatic confrontations.
According to the source material, Taiwan Travelogue presents itself as a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir, a fictitious pseudo-translation so convincing that many readers in Taiwan believed it genuine when first published there in 2020. The controversy over its fabricated nature was, in a sense, the point, as the novel explores the instability of historical records.
Language serves as a primary site of power in the story. In 1938, the national language of Taiwan was Japanese, while people spoke Hokkien, Hakka, or Indigenous languages at home. Chi-chan’s role involves making two worlds intelligible, yet the novel questions whether translation can ever fully close distances created by power.
Yáng has said her decision to write about Japanese colonial Taiwan responded to questions raised by the 2014 Sunflower Movement about the difference between Taiwan and China. She concluded that the colonial period represented Taiwan’s irreducible layer, a history that could not be simplified or replaced by a larger neighbor.
The English translation by Lin King retains the book’s multilingual texture, including translator’s notes and layered pseudo-documentary elements. King has described this approach as a refusal to simplify Taiwan’s reality, comparing it to orange juice that comes with juicy bits rather than smooth.
Earlier Australian accounts, such as Frank Clune’s 1958 book Flight to Formosa, presented a different picture shaped by Cold War needs. Clune described Taiwan as a democratic outpost and wrote about a Mongolian barbecue in Taipei as a taste of ancient China, unaware that the dish had been invented less than a decade earlier by soldiers and civilians who fled the mainland.
Until 13 years before Clune’s visit, Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for half a century. The multilingual complexity involving Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese, and Indigenous languages remained inaudible to foreign guests at the time, according to the account.
The food depicted in Taiwan Travelogue reflects Taiwanese cuisine shaped by Indigenous ingredients, Japanese imperial influence, and culinary memories from Fujian and Guangdong. This portrayal predates the Chinese Civil War and shows a society with its own interior life and hierarchies of intimacy.
Yáng writes the story as both a love story and a political novel, noting that in Taiwan’s history the two have never been separable. The book examines the labor of making oneself understood to someone holding power and the intimacy that can grow despite inequality.
For Australian readers, the novel offers an introduction to Taiwan as a lived society rather than solely a strategic flashpoint. It shows how understanding can build through stories read carefully and meals described precisely, an approach that political solidarity alone may not achieve.
The prize marks a significant moment for literature from Taiwan reaching international audiences. Officials and literary observers have noted that the work’s specific linguistic and historical texture makes it difficult to appropriate or claim by others.