Taiwan’s Yáng Shuāng-zǐ wins the International Booker Prize for a multilayered historical romance

LONDON (AP) — Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King won the International Booker Prize on Tuesday for “Taiwan Travelogue,” a historical romance set in Japan-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s.

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 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.”

Yáng, who writes fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, has said she “wanted to untangle the complex circumstances” of Taiwan’s time as a Japanese colony.

“Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,” she told the Booker Prizes website.

Published in its original language in 2020, “Taiwan Travelogue” is the first of Yáng’s books to be translated into English. In the U.S., it won the National Book Award’s translation category in 2024.

The judges praised the way Taiwanese-American translator King’s translation adds another layer to a book that plays with ideas of communication across languages.

The book beat five other finalists to the prize, which recognizes translated fiction from around the world published in the U.K. or Ireland. The 50,000 pounds ($67,000) in prize money is split by author and translator.

The International Booker was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages — which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain — and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators.

It is run alongside the Booker Prize for English-language fiction, which will be handed out in the fall, and the Children’s Booker Prize, which will be awarded for the first time next year.