Tuesday May 19 in London, the Taiwanese novelist Yang Shuang-zi left the Tate Modern with the International Booker Prize under her arm, a first for literature in Mandarin.
This is a historic first. Taiwanese novelist Yang Shuang-zi won the International Booker Prize for the novel Taïwan Travelogue. It is the first book written in Mandarin to win this award.
Awarded each year in the United Kingdom, the International Booker Prize rewards a novel translated into English and is among the most influential literary awards in the world. It was in the rooms of the Tate Modern, between two modern paintings, that the prize was awarded to him on the evening of Tuesday May 19.
A culinary journey
The novel delves into Taiwan in the 1930s, under Japanese occupation, through the eyes of a Japanese writer on a culinary journey, accompanied by a local interpreter. Jury president Natasha Brown called it a book “captivating, subtly sophisticated†who “succeeds as both a love story and an incisive postcolonial novel†. Yang Shuang-zi, born in 1984, navigates between fiction, manga and video game scenarios, and confides that her research for novel “changed his life in two obvious ways: my savings dwindled; my weight has increased!†A gourmet versatility which, this Tuesday evening, offered itself the most beautiful table.
The 50,000 pound prize is shared with translator Lin King, who has Taiwanese and American nationality. The novel, published in Mandarin in 2020, has only been available in English since March 2026. Is it available in French? Not yet. But after the International Booker Prize, the queue for translations is expected to grow quickly. Among the finalists, we will note the presence of the Frenchwoman Marie Ndiaye, whose At Sorcie¨re (published in 1996) has just been translated into English.
