LONDON — Taiwan Travelogue won the 2026 International Booker Prize, marking the first time a work translated from Mandarin Chinese has taken the award. Author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King became the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the prize, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2026.

The pair will split the £50,000 award, around $67,000. The International Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best work of fiction translated into English.

The novel presents as a rediscovered fictional travel memoir from 1930s Japan-occupied Taiwan that follows two main characters on a culinary tour across Taiwan. Judges described it as a "captivating, slyly sophisticated" book.

"Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double feat. It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel," chair of judges Natasha Brown said in a press release.

In an interview with the Booker Prize Foundation, author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ described the historical terrain the novel explores. "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. 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," she said.

Translator Lin King spoke about her approach to the material in the same interview. "I personally dislike historical fiction that is strictly miserable," she said. King said the novel reflects the breadth of humour, good food, movies, school, petty fights, and romance that remains during difficult periods in history, and functions as a window into a largely hidden past where characters' identities and experiences are not bulldozed over by their suffering.

Publishers submitted 128 books for the 2026 prize, six of which were shortlisted. The other shortlisted titles were Shida Bazyar's The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, Ana Paula Maia's On Earth As It Is Beneath, Marie NDiaye's The Witch, Daniel Kehlmann's The Director, and Rene Karabash's She Who Remains. Each shortlisted author and translator pair will receive £5,000 to split between them.

The 2025 International Booker Prize was awarded to Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories by Banu Mushtaq about the lives of girls and women in south Indian Muslim communities. The 2026 prize ceremony was held in London.