Taiwan's Yáng Shuang-zi wins International Booker Prize for 'slyly sophisticated novel'

'Taiwan Travelogue' is first novel written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious prize for fiction translated into English.

Taiwanese author Yáng Shuang-zi and translator Lin King have won the International Booker Prize for Taiwan Travelogue, a historical romance set in Japan-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s.

The prestigious award, which was handed out in a ceremony at London's Tate Modern gallery on Tuesday, recognises works of fiction from around the world that have been translated into English.

It is the first novel written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious prize for fiction translated into English.

British novelist Natasha Brown, who chaired the judging panel, called it a "captivating, wryly sophisticated" book that plays with themes of language and power and offers the reader surprises along the way.

The novel, set in 1930s Japan-controlled Taiwan, purports to be a travel memoir by a Japanese novelist on a culinary tour of Taiwan and charts the — fictional — writer's complex relationship with her local interpreter.

Brown said the book explores class and colonialism, asking: "Can love overcome a power imbalance?" She said it "pulls off an incredible double act: It succeeds both as a romance and as an incisive postcolonial novel." "It's a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel."

This is Yang's first book translated into English, by Taiwanese-American King. They will share the £50,000 ($67,000) prize money.

The book was first published in Mandarin in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award.

"The novel's central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up," Yang said.

Taiwan Travelogue beat out a story about a suburban witch by French novelist and playwright Marie NDiaye as well as Brazilian Ana Paula Maia's dystopian read about a brutal prison colony.

The other shortlisted works were The Nights Are Quiet In Tehran by German writer Shida Bazyar, She Who Remains by Bulgarian poet and writer Rene Karabash, and The Director by German-Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, the only male author on the list.

Organisers say the award gives the authors writing in languages other than English a significant boost in profile and sales.

Previous winners Han Kang, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk have gone on to become Nobel laureates.

The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a single work of fiction — either a novel or a collection of short stories — written in another language, translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.

According to the organisers, the 2025 winner Heart Lamp — the first collection of short stories to win the prize and the first translated from Kannada — rapidly sold out in the UK in the subsequent days, with the UK publisher, And Other Stories, immediately reprinting 40,000 copies.