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A communicative astir Taiwanese nutrient and emotion betwixt 2 women won the International Booker Prize 2026 connected Tuesday (May 19, 2026).
Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāng-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, is experimental successful form. It contains a scholarly foreword, afterwords, fictional footnotes and existent translator’s notes.
The caller begins successful 1938. Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese novelist from Nagasaki, arrives successful Taiwan, a Japanese colony, connected a government-sponsored tour. Disinterested successful the authoritative events oregon the imperialist agenda, she alternatively decides to research Taiwan done its food, guided by her voracious appetite. She befriends a charming and reserved Taiwanese woman, Chizuru, who serves arsenic some her interpreter and an exceptional cook.
Chizuko becomes profoundly fond of her companion, adjacent urging her to interruption disconnected her engagement, but Chizuru maintains a distance. Whether she returns Chizuko’s feelings is the question that propels the caller forward. Their narration — shaped by their antithetic people backgrounds, with 1 pistillate from the empire and the different from the colony — reflects the analyzable dynamics of power.
The prize was announced by Natasha Brown, seat of the 2026 judges, astatine a ceremonial astatine London’s Tate Modern connected May 19. In announcing it, the committee said, “Taiwan Travelogue pulls disconnected an unthinkable treble feat: it succeeds arsenic some a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel. As judges, we’ve enjoyed affluent discussions astir the galore layers of this book. It’s a captivating, slyly blase novel.”
The caller is Yáng Shuāng-zi’s archetypal to beryllium translated into English and the archetypal translation from the Mandarin Chinese to triumph the International Booker Prize. This is besides the 2nd twelvemonth successful a enactment that the autarkic press, And Other Stories, has taken location the prize, pursuing Heart Lamp past year.
Yáng and King volition divided the £50,000 prize, which recognises the champion fabrication translated into English, arsenic betwixt them.
