"Taiwan Travelogue"

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026

"Literature cannot, at its core, separate itself from politics," said Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi at the award ceremony at Tate Modern in London, where she received this year's International Booker Prize.

She won the prestigious literary prize for the English translation of her novel "Taiwan Travelogue". Set in occupied Taiwan in the 1930s, the novel tells the love story of a Japanese writer and her Taiwanese translator as they travel through the country together. In lyrical, carefully crafted prose, Yang Shuang-zi traces what appears on the surface to be a romantic journey through a land then under Japanese occupation - one where the two women savour its beauty and culinary richness. Only on closer reading does the author's true artistry emerge: it is the constraints of unequal power and colonialism that ultimately keep the lovers apart. Politics intrudes into the most private of spaces. What does it really mean to taste unfamiliar food - and what happens to a relationship when the external dynamics of power quietly seep into two women's conversations?

Disguised as the translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese author, the novel brings a long-neglected chapter of East Asian history to light and was a sensation in Taiwan.

Yang Shuang-zi (born 1984) is a writer, essayist, and literary critic. "Yang Shuang-zi" is her pen name, meaning "twins" - a reference to her late twin sister, with whom she originally shared it.