Taiwan Travelogue, a love letter to food and adventure, wins International Booker Prize

A tale about forbidden love and Taiwanese food has won the International Booker Prize, becoming the first novel translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious award.

Taiwan Travelogue, written by Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi and Taiwanese-American translator Lin King, follows two women on their culinary tour across Taiwan in the 1930s, when the island was under Japanese rule.

Elaborately framed as the translation of a rediscovered travel memoir, complete with fictional footnotes, many readers thought it was about a genuine historic text when the book was first published in 2020.

"It's a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel," said Natasha Brown, the chair of the judging panel.

Taiwan Travelogue centres on a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, who is on a government-sponsored tour of Taiwan with a Taiwanese translator, O Chizuru, whom she falls in love with.

Through their lens, the novel explores issues of love, culture, colonial history and power.

"Research for the novel's central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways," Yang told the Booker Prize before her win was announced. "My savings went down; my weight went up."

Taiwan Travelogue had already won several accolades.

Yang, 41, also writes essays, manga and video game scripts. Her original Mandarin Chinese version of the novel won Taiwan's highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award in 2021.

Lin King's English translation version won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024.

Also speaking before the win, King said she appreciated the balance Taiwan Travelogue struck between the sorrow and joys of Taiwanese people under Japanese control.

"No matter how difficult times are, I believe that humans always manage to find flickers of levity and deep wells of love," she said.

"There was still humour, good food, movies, school, petty fights, and romance. To suggest otherwise is to reduce a culture to its trauma," she said.

In winning the International Booker Prize, the judges noted in a statement the "vital work of translation", adding the £50,000 ($67,000) prize money would be split equally between the author and writer.