Yáng Shuāng-zǐ Wins International Booker Prize for Taiwan Travelogue
taiwan travelogue won the International Booker Prize on Tuesday evening at Tate Modern in London, making Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King the first winners with a book originally written in Mandarin Chinese. The £50,000 prize is split equally between them.
The win puts a Mandarin Chinese original at the center of the prize that recognises the best fiction translated into English. It also gives Taiwan Travelogue the kind of cross-market visibility that can travel well beyond the Booker shortlist, especially after it prevailed over five other shortlisted titles.
Tate Modern and the £50,000 prize
Yáng and King were announced as the winners on Tuesday evening at Tate Modern, with the money divided evenly between author and translator. That split is standard for the prize, but the first-time Mandarin Chinese result gives this year’s award a sharper industry edge than a routine shortlist verdict.
And Other Stories has now won the prize for the second year in a row, after Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, took last year’s award. For publishers and translators, that repeat win signals a house with real translated-fiction momentum, not a one-off lucky break.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King
Taiwan Travelogue is presented as a translation of a rediscovered memoir and is set in 1938, from the perspective of a novelist who sails to Japan-occupied Taiwan, joins a culinary tour with an interpreter and falls in love with him. The book also uses fictional footnotes and afterwords by the characters, along with real ones by King, which gives it a structure that moves beyond a standard love story.
Natasha Brown said the book “pulls off an incredible double feat” and described it as “both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” She also said it wraps “an intriguing metafictional layer around its core love story,” a useful shorthand for why it stood out in a field built on translation, voice and formal risk.
Mandarin Chinese breakthrough
The prize had never before gone to a book originally written in Mandarin Chinese, so this is a first for the award as much as for the book. Yáng and King are also the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners, which extends the prize’s reach to creators who have not often occupied its center.
The novel’s original Mandarin Chinese publication already won Taiwan’s Golden Tripod award, and King’s English translation won the US National Book Award for translated literature in 2024. That combination is the clearest sign that Taiwan Travelogue is landing with both domestic recognition and international prize juries, which is exactly the kind of dual-track profile translated fiction needs to keep crossing markets.
Mid-90s writing roots
In a March interview on the Booker prize website, Yáng said she began writing because of the boom in Taiwanese romance novels in the mid-90s. “My middle school classmates decided to form a writing group together, though of the five of us, I’m the only one who kept writing,” she said.
She also said, “Using a contemporary Taiwanese lens, 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.” That aim matches the book’s prize run: a formally layered novel about history, intimacy and translation that has now moved from a local publishing success into the prize’s record books.
