The Booker International Prize goes to the first book written in Mandarin Chinese Culture

Taiwan Travelogue, a book written by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translated by Lin King, became the first book written in Mandarin Chinese to achieve success. International Booker Prize.

Yang and King were announced as the winners of the £50,000 prize – to be split equally between them – at a ceremony at Tate Modern, London, on Tuesday evening.

The book is described as a translation of a rediscovered memoir, written from the perspective of a novelist who travels to Japan. Taiwan in 1938 and begins a culinary journey with a translator, whom he loves. The book contains footnotes and fiction about the book’s characters and “real” stories written by King, which “binds the fictional elements around his love story”, says judge and author Natasha Brown.

It is the second year in a row that independent journalists Sheffield And Other Stories have received the award, following. Soul of Life and Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, last year.

Taiwan Travelogue “It has a double appeal”, added Brown, which became “a romance and a classic post-colonial novel”.

Yáng and King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-Americans to receive the award, which recognizes the best fiction translated into English. The original Chinese Mandarin edition won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod award, and the King’s English translation won the US National Book Award for literary translation in 2024.

Along with fiction, Yáng writes novels, manga and video games. King also writes original fiction – his first novel, Weeb, is forthcoming.

In his acceptance speech, Yang touched on Taiwan’s politics, saying: “Some people believe that art and literature should not be involved in politics, but I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it grows.”

In this sense, literature, to a large extent, cannot separate itself from politics.” In researching the modern history of Taiwanese literature, it is clear that writers have been asking the same question for the past 100 years: What kind of future do Taiwanese people want?

King said in his speech that the all-out attack on Ukraine inspired him to publish articles from Taiwan in the future. “My goal for myself and my fellow translators is to bring so many words from Taiwan to English that no one can reduce Taiwanese writing to one word, because we are not musicians but self-contradictory, self-contradictory and unruly, as in any healthy, strong democracy.”

In March interview on Booker prize website, Yáng said he started writing because of the proliferation of Taiwanese romance novels in the 90s. He said: “My primary school friends decided to form a writing group together, although out of the five of us, I was the only one who continued to write.”

When asked about the inspiration for Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng explained that although “Korea and Taiwan were once territories of the Japanese empire”, the Korean people “seem to hate that history, while the Taiwanese people see it as an incoherent mixture of frustration. It’s what kind of future we should strive to have.”

Taiwan Travelogue won five other unelected positions: Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel, On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, and The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin.

Brown was joined on the judging panel by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, and writers Troy Onyango and Nilanjana S Roy. This year’s prize was open to full-length fiction and short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 May 2025 and 30 April 2026.

Previous winners of the International Booker prize include Han Kang for The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, and Olga Tokarczuk for Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft.

• To browse all the shortlisted titles for The International Booker 2026 prize, visit guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.