A Taiwanese novel set in the colonial kitchens and complicated silences of 1930s Taiwan has won the 2026 International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yáng Shuāng-zi and translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, was announced as the winner on May 19 at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London. The prize, which recognises the best fiction translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland, carries a £50,000 award split equally between author and translator — a deliberate gesture toward recognising translation as a creative act in its own right. This is the first time a work originally written in Mandarin Chinese has won the award.

The novel opens in 1938, when Aoyama Chizuko, a fictional Japanese novelist from Nagasaki, arrives in Taiwan — then a Japanese colony — on a government-sponsored tour. Uninterested in the official imperial agenda, she explores the island through its food, accompanied by Wang Qianzhu (Chizuru), a charming Taiwanese woman who serves as her interpreter and guide. A deep, quietly charged bond develops between them, shaped by the asymmetries of empire: one woman from the colonising power, the other from the colonised territory. The judges described the novel as pulling off