Taiwan’s Booker shortlist first

Yang Shuang-zi is the first Taiwanese author ever shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, putting *Taiwan Travelogue* into the final six for 2026. (focustaiwan.tw) The Booker Prize Foundation announced the 2026 shortlist on March 31, choosing six finalists from a longlist of 13 titles that had been narrowed from 128 submissions. Yang’s book is translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, who shares the prize equally with the author if it wins. (thebookerprizes.com; focustaiwan.tw; lithub.com) Yang told Central News Agency in Bangkok on April 12 that the recognition “belongs to an entire team,” and singled out Lin King by name. She said the shortlist result reflected work by translators, publishers, agents and public support around Taiwanese literature. (focustaiwan.tw) The International Booker Prize covers fiction translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland, which means the shortlist recognizes both the book and the translation that carried it to English-language readers. The 2026 winner is scheduled to be announced in London on May 19, with a £50,000 award split between author and translator. (lithub.com; thebookerprizes.com; www.moc.gov.tw) For Taiwan, the shortlist goes beyond one season’s prize list. Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture said no literary work from Taiwan had previously reached the International Booker shortlist, although Wu Ming-yi’s *The Stolen Bicycle* was longlisted in 2018. (www.moc.gov.tw) *Taiwan Travelogue* first appeared in Mandarin in 2020 and is set in 1938, during Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. The novel follows a young Japanese writer and her Taiwanese interpreter on a food-centered journey that opens into questions of language, power and intimacy. (focustaiwan.tw; thebookerprizes.com)) The Booker Prize site describes the novel as a romance and a postcolonial novel, and notes that its British edition was published by And Other Stories on March 5, 2026. Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture said the Mandarin original won the Golden Tripod Award, and the English edition won the National Book Award for Literature in Translation in the United States in 2024. (thebookerprizes.com; www.moc.gov.tw) Yang used the moment to argue for more translation, not just more attention to one book. She said Taiwan still has too few novels in translation and pointed to poetry, essays and theater as other forms that could carry more Taiwanese voices abroad. (focustaiwan.tw) Her closing image was about infrastructure, not celebrity. “Only having a pier is not enough,” Yang said. “We need to build a whole bridge so the entire team can cross together.” (focustaiwan.tw)