Taiwan Travelogue, a novel by Taiwanese writer Yang Shuang-zi (楊?子), is among six shortlisted titles for this year’s International Booker Prize — the first time a Taiwanese author has reached the final stage of the prestigious award.
The Booker Prize Foundation on Tuesday announced the finalists from a longlist of 13 titles, narrowed down from 128 submissions.
The annual prize recognizes fiction translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. Author-translator pairs who make the shortlist receive ￡5,000 (US$6,650) and the winners, to be announced on May 19, would split a ￡50,000 grand prize.
Photo: screengrab from the Internet
The foundation said the novel’s appearance on the shortlist represented the first time a Taiwanese writer had made the cut and that a victory for the novel would represent a historic first for Taiwan.
This year’s shortlist features writers and translators from eight countries: Taiwan, the UK, the US, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France and Germany, the foundation said.
Five of the six shortlisted authors and four of the six shortlisted translators are women, and the selected works were originally written in five languages: Chinese, Bulgarian, French, German and Portuguese.
First published in 2020, Taiwan Travelogue is set in 1938 and is a work of historical fiction that explores friendship and colonial identity through a culinary journey across Taiwan.
It has been translated into several languages including Japanese, English and Korean.
Its English translator, Lin King (金翎), previously won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature for her work on the novel — also a first for Taiwanese literature.
In Taipei, Culture Minister Li Yuan (李遠) congratulated Yang, thanking her for bringing Taiwan to global attention through literature.
The Ministry of Culture said that the novel’s path to international success was supported by government initiatives, including a youth creative grant and a translation funding program.
The cultural division of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK is planning a series of literary talks and book signings across the UK later this year that would feature Yang and King.
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