On Tuesday, May 19th in London, Taiwanese novelist Yang Shuang-zi left the Tate Modern with the International Booker Prize, a first for Mandarin literature.
It’s a historic win. Taiwanese novelist Yang Shuang-zi clinched the International Booker Prize for the novel “Taiwan Travelogue”. This is the first book written in Mandarin to win this prestigious award.
Awarded annually in the UK, the International Booker Prize honors a novel translated into English and is among the most influential literary awards worldwide. The prize was presented to Yang Shuang-zi at the Tate Modern on the evening of Tuesday, May 19th, amidst modern artworks.
The novel delves into Taiwan in the 1930s, under Japanese occupation, through the eyes of a Japanese writer on a culinary journey, accompanied by a local interpreter. Jury president Natasha Brown hailed it as a book “captivating, subtly sophisticated” that “succeeds both as a love story and as a sharp postcolonial novel”. Born in 1984, Yang Shuang-zi navigates between fiction, manga, and video game scripts, revealing that her research for the novel “has changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings have decreased; my weight has increased!” A culinary versatility that, on this Tuesday evening, enjoyed the finest of dining experiences.
The £50,000 award is shared with translator Lin King, who holds Taiwanese and American nationalities. The novel was originally published in Mandarin in 2020 and only became available in English in March 2026. Is it available in French? Not yet. But after the International Booker Prize, the queue for translations is expected to grow rapidly. Among the finalists, notable mentions include French author Marie Ndiaye, whose “The Sorceress” (published in 1996) has just been translated into English.
