Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and her English translator Lin King have received the 2026 International Booker Prize for Taiwan Travelogue. The novel is the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the award in its ten-year history, and Yang is the first Taiwanese writer to take the prize.

The judges described Taiwan Travelogue as “a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel” that “pulls off an incredible double feat: it succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel”. For Australian readers, it is an introduction to a Taiwan most of them have never encountered.

Taiwan Travelogue – Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (And Other Stories)

Australians have not been well served when it comes to understanding Taiwan. The most widely read Australian account of the island remains Frank Clune’s Flight to Formosa, published in 1958 at the height of the second Taiwan Strait crisis. His Taiwan was exactly what a Cold War audience needed: a Chinese island, a democratic outpost, the good guys holding the line.

Clune was a professional travel writer, who went places on his readers’ behalf and came back with exotic dispatches. When he sat down to a Mongolian barbecue in Taipei, he wrote about it as a taste of ancient China. No one told him that the dish had been invented less than a decade earlier and adopted by soldiers and civilians, who had fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek after the Chinese Civil War.

Until 13 years before their arrival, Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for half a century. Yet the Taiwan Clune was shown was entirely Mandarin-speaking. Its multilingual complexity – Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese, the languages of the island’s Indigenous people – was made inaudible to a foreign guest.

When Clune visited, there was no such thing as Taiwanese literature. That category had not yet been invented. It would take another generation, and a political struggle Clune did not live to witness, for the island to begin finding its own literary voice.

Taiwan Travelogue is........

© The Conversation