Overview
- Tajwan Travelogue, announced Tuesday at London’s Tate Modern by chair Natasha Brown, won the International Booker Prize for translated fiction.
- The win marks the first time a book written in Chinese has taken the award and the first honors for a Taiwanese author and a Taiwanese-American translator, with £50,000 shared equally.
- The novel presents a 1930s Taiwan love story as a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir and uses footnotes and layered voices to probe food, power, and colonial rule.
- Judges praised Lin King’s English version for capturing multiple narrative voices, building on the translation’s earlier U.S. National Book Award win in 2024.
- The U.K. edition is published by indie press And Other Stories, which now records a second straight International Booker victory, underscoring small presses’ role in bringing global literature to English readers.