A Booker shortlist pick
Yang Shuang‑zi’s Taiwan Travelogue has been named to the 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist, with reviewers flagging its focus on colonial Taiwan and crediting translator Lin King for the English edition. (thehindu.com).
A novel set in Japanese-ruled Taiwan in May 1938 is now one of six books on the 2026 International Booker Prize shortlist, putting Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King in contention for a prize that honors a work of fiction translated into English. (thebookerprizes.com) The book is built like a literary trick box: it presents itself as the “translation” of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, even though the novel itself was originally written in Mandarin Chinese and first published in 2020. (thebookerprizes.com) At the center are two women traveling through Taiwan under empire: Aoyama Chizuko, a young novelist from Nagasaki, and Chizuru, the interpreter guiding her across the island. Their shared attention to food turns meals into a running record of who belongs, who serves, and who gets described. (graywolfpress.org) The setting matters because Taiwan was under Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945, so a 1938 train trip is not just scenery but a journey through a colony near the end of imperial rule. The Booker site says the novel “unearths lost colonial histories” and tracks how power reaches into intimate relationships. (thebookerprizes.com) Yáng Shuāng-zǐ has said one reason she wrote the book was the difference she saw between Korean and Taiwanese memories of Japanese empire: Korea often frames that past through clearer resentment, while Taiwan’s memory can carry both discomfort and nostalgia at once. That mixed memory is the novel’s pressure point. (thebookerprizes.com) Lin King’s role is not a footnote here. The International Booker Prize is awarded to author and translator together, and each shortlisted book receives £2,500 for the writer and £2,500 for the translator before the winner is announced. (thebookerprizes.com; lithub.com) This is also Yáng’s first book translated into English, and it has already traveled unusually fast: the Booker author page says the English edition won the 2024 National Book Award for Literature in Translation and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. (thebookerprizes.com) Reviewers have zeroed in on how the novel handles culture through texture instead of lectures. The Hindu’s review places the story in 1938 and describes Taiwan as being in “cultural osmosis,” with food, language, and etiquette showing how Japanese and Taiwanese lives rub against each other without ever becoming equal. (thehindu.com) The shortlist was announced in April 2026, and the winner is due to be named on May 19 in London. If Taiwan Travelogue wins, the prize money is split equally, with £25,000 going to Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and £25,000 to Lin King. (thebookerprizes.com; lithub.com)
