{"id":450789,"date":"2026-05-20T07:25:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T07:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/450789\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T07:25:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T07:25:09","slug":"taiwan-travelogue-yang-shuang-zi-and-translator-lin-king-win-the-international-booker-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/450789\/","title":{"rendered":"Taiwan Travelogue: Y\u00e1ng Shu\u0101ng-z\u01d0 and translator Lin King win the International Booker Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>  By&amp;nbsp<a href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/profiles\/66\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Tokunbo Salako<\/a>&amp;nbspwith&amp;nbspAP <\/p>\n<p>\n         Published on<br \/>\n            20\/05\/2026 &#8211; 8:29 GMT+2\n            <\/p>\n<p>Taiwanese author Y\u00e1ng Shu\u0101ng-z\u01d0 and translator Lin King have won the <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/international-booker-prize-india-mushtaq-bhasthi-02da7cdb8c0e7c4fa37040f59155bd9e\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\">International Booker Prize<\/a> for \u201cTaiwan Travelogue,\u201d a historical romance set in Japan-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s.<\/p>\n<p>          <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-ad__placeholder__logo\" src=\"https:\/\/static.euronews.com\/website\/images\/logos\/logo-euronews-stacked-outlined-72x72-grey-9.svg\" width=\"72\" height=\"72\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\"\/><br \/>\n          ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>          <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-ad__placeholder__logo\" src=\"https:\/\/static.euronews.com\/website\/images\/logos\/logo-euronews-stacked-outlined-72x72-grey-9.svg\" width=\"72\" height=\"72\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\"\/><br \/>\n          ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>It is the first novel written in Mandarin Chinese to win the prestigious award for fiction translated into English.<\/p>\n<p>The book purports to be a travel memoir by a Japanese novelist on a culinary tour of Taiwan and charts the fictional writer\u2019s complex relationship with her local interpreter.<\/p>\n<p>British novelist Natasha Brown, who chaired the judging panel, called it a \u201ccaptivating, wryly sophisticated\u201d book that plays with themes of language and power and offers the reader surprises along the way.<\/p>\n<p>The panel also praised the way Taiwanese-American translator King\u2019s translation adds another layer to a book that plays with ideas of communication across languages.<\/p>\n<p>Prize money of \u00a350,000 (\u20ac57,000) is shared between author and translator.<\/p>\n<p>Y\u00e1ng, who writes fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, has said she \u201cwanted to untangle the complex circumstances\u201d of Taiwan\u2019s time as a Japanese colony.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cResearch for the novel\u2019s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up,\u201d she told the Booker Prizes website.<\/p>\n<p>Published in its original language in 2020, \u201cTaiwan Travelogue\u201d is the first of Y\u00e1ng\u2019s books to be translated into English. In the United States, it won the National Book Award\u2019s translation category in 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Despite only publishing in March this year in the UK \u2013 following the longlist announcement in February, &#8220;Taiwan Travelogue_&#8221;_ was the second-bestselling title on the International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist.<\/p>\n<p>To date, rights have been sold in a total of 23 territories, ranging from Serbia to Indonesia and Brazil to Ukraine.<\/p>\n<p>The International Booker was set up to boost the profile of fiction in other languages \u2014 which accounts for only a small share of books published in Britain \u2014 and to salute the underappreciated work of literary translators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By&amp;nbspTokunbo Salako&amp;nbspwith&amp;nbspAP Published on 20\/05\/2026 &#8211; 8:29 GMT+2 Taiwanese author Y\u00e1ng Shu\u0101ng-z\u01d0 and translator Lin King have won&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[5800,412,146,85,210729,46,425,15624,18570],"class_list":["post-450789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-author","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-international-booker-prize","tag-israel","tag-literature","tag-taiwan","tag-writer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}