Taiwan Travelogue | Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026: Winner of the National Book Award

'Complex, enchanting and heartbreaking in equal measures. Taiwan Travelogue beautifully explores the challenges of love and friendship across an inherent power imbalance' The International Booker Prize 2026 judges

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon, a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

Yáng Shuāng- zǐ is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism from Táichūng, Taiwan. In 2020, she was featured in Wenshun magazine’s Rising Stars of the Twenty- First Century and Unitas magazine’s Twenty Most Promising Young Novelists. In 2021, she was the youngest- ever nominee for the United Daily News Literary Award, and her novel Taiwan Travelogue was awarded the Golden Tripod Award, Taiwan’s highest literary honor. In 2022, Yáng was voted Representative Author of Twenty- First Century Taiwanese Popular Literature.

'With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel’ The International Booker Prize 2026 judges

'Yáng Shuāng-zi takes us on a metafictional voyage through the cuisines, customs, and landmarks of Taiwan under Japanese rule. A translation of a novel disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text, this is a sweeping tale of colonialism and impossible friendship' National Book Awards 2024 judges

‘Yáng has structured her novel like a matryoshka doll: a straightforward story surrounded by many twisting layers of mystery’ Atlantic

‘(A) delightfully slippery novel about how power shapes relationships, and what travel reveals and conceals ... a virtuosic performance of literary polyphony’ New York Times