Yang Shuang-zi first developed the concept for her genre-bending novel, Taiwan Travelogue, in 2017. In an interview on the Booker Prizes web site, she says she formally started work on the e-book in February 2019 and accomplished the primary draft by August of the identical 12 months. Every chapter in it’s named after a Taiwanese dish — roasted seeds, jute soup, beef and vegetable hotpot, leftovers soup, and so forth. “Analysis for the novel’s central themes of journey and meals modified my life in two apparent methods: my financial savings went down; my weight went up,” she joked.
When she went on stage together with her translator, the Taiwanese-American, Lin King, to collectively obtain the £50,000 Worldwide Booker Prize for 2026 at Tate Trendy in London final week, King quipped that Yang had cake on her palms, a element which “epitomises this complete e-book”. Taiwan Travelogue, revealed by And Different Tales, is the primary English translation of Yang’s work and has catapulted her to literary fame. She is the primary Taiwanese author to win the Worldwide Booker Prize, and the e-book is the primary translation from Mandarin Chinese language to win the prize.
Yang was born Yang Jo-tzu in 1984 in a village close to Taichung, Central Taiwan. She adopted the pen title ‘Shuang-zi’, which means twins, in reminiscence of her twin sister, Yang Jo-hui, who died of most cancers in 2015. As a baby, she developed a love for books, particularly after studying Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, which sparked her lifelong ardour for Manga. Within the Nineties, Yang dove into the romance novels and queer literature that flourished in her nation. She additionally grew fascinated with yuri, a subculture in Japan that focuses on intimate relationships between ladies. Literature arguably contributed to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Taiwan in 2019.
Taiwan Travelogue is about in 1938 — just a few many years earlier than Yang was born — when Taiwan was below Japanese rule. It follows a Japanese novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, on a government- sponsored journey. She decides to discover Taiwan by its meals, guided by her “monstrous urge for food”. She befriends a captivating Taiwanese lady, Chizuru, who’s her interpreter and in addition a rare prepare dinner. Chizuko turns into infatuated together with her, however Chizuru maintains a distance. Whether or not Chizuru returns Chizuko’s emotions is the query that propels the novel ahead.
Complexity of energy
Their relationship — formed by their completely different class backgrounds, with one lady a ‘Mainlander’ and the opposite an ‘Islander’ — displays the advanced dynamics of energy.
Yang has mentioned in interviews that she needed to put in writing a historic novel from a feminine perspective. Taiwan Travelogue can also be her try, she mentioned, to “assist them [Taiwanese] dissect the difficult emotion” they’ve in direction of the interval of Japanese colonialism, which is a “conflicted mixture of distaste and nostalgia”.
Yang, who can also be a author of Manga, online game scripts, and fiction, was awarded Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod Award, for the unique Mandarin Chinese language model of Taiwan Travelogue, revealed in 2020. Regardless of its acclaim, the e-book struggled to seek out an English writer for a very long time.
Lin King’s English-language translation gained the Nationwide E-book Award for Translated Literature in 2024. Now, the e-book has been revealed, or is slated for publication, in a number of languages, together with Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, and Greek. It isn’t obtainable within the Individuals’s Republic of China, although Yang advised The Observer that a few of her Chinese language mates purchased copies and quietly smuggled them into the nation. She additionally expressed a want that the Chinese language would learn it and are available to grasp that the Taiwanese are culturally, and due to this fact nationally, a definite inhabitants. “A few of us imagine ourselves to be Chinese language after which others imagine that we’re Taiwanese, and I needed to specific that someway by my e-book,” she advised The Guardian. “As Taiwanese individuals, we have to ask ourselves now – can we need to return to being colonised? Will we need to need to stay like that once more? Be second-class residents in our personal land? I refuse.”
On receiving the prize, Yang made it clear that she doesn’t imagine that artwork and literature should be stored removed from politics. “I imagine that literature can’t be separated from the soil by which it has grown,” she mentioned throughout her speech at Tate Trendy. She discovered the best translator in King, who advised the viewers that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she made the “specific choice that moderately than translating Sinophile works indiscriminately”, she would “solely translate writing from Taiwan within the foreseeable future”.
Printed – Might 24, 2026 01:46 am IST