International Booker Prize awarded to Taiwanese author for first time ever

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize, awarded each year to the best work of fiction translated into English, npr.org writes.

It’s the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker.

Yang and translator Lin King are also the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize. They will split the £50,000 award — around $67,000.

The novel presents a rediscovered (and fictional) travel memoir from 1930s Japan-occupied Taiwan, as its two main characters embark together on a culinary tour across Taiwan.

“Both Korea and Taiwan were once colonies of the Japanese Empire, but Koreans seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia,” Yáng said in an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation. “I wanted to untangle the complex circumstances that Taiwan’s people faced in the past, and to explore what kind of future we ought to strive toward.”