Taiwanese Novelist Makes International Booker Shortlist With Colonial-Era Love Story

On a humid evening in 1930s Taipei, a Japanese novelist sits down to dinner. The dish in front of her is unfamiliar, its name carrying the weight of an empire. Across the table, her Taiwanese interpreter translates not only the menu but an entire colonized world, and a quiet romance begins to unfold between them.

That imagined scene, from Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāng‑zǐ’s novel Taiwan Travelogue, echoed in London on March 31, when judges for the 2026 International Booker Prize named the book to their six-title shortlist. It is the first time a Taiwanese author has reached the finals of one of the world’s leading awards for literature in translation.

A shortlist spanning continents and upheaval

The shortlist, announced at an afternoon event in London and streamed online, spans four continents and a century of upheaval. The six books move from imperial Japan’s rule in Taiwan to Nazi-era Europe, the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, carceral violence in Brazil, tribal codes in the Albanian Alps and the suburban fringes of France.

“With narratives that capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history,” said chair of judges Natasha Brown, a British novelist, in a statement released with the list. While the stories contain “heartbreak, brutality and isolation,” she added, their “lasting effect is energizing,” offering “hope, insight and burning humanity — along with unforgettable characters to whom I’m sure readers will return again and again.”

How the prize works

The International Booker Prize, run by the Booker Prize Foundation, honors a single work of fiction translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The £50,000 award, to be announced May 19 at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London, is split equally between author and translator. Each shortlisted title also receives £5,000, again shared between writer and translator.

This year’s shortlist was drawn from 128 submissions published between May 1, 2025, and April 30, 2026. A 13-book longlist was unveiled in February before the judges — Brown, mathematician and author Marcus du Sautoy, translator Sophie Hughes, Kenyan writer and editor Troy Onyango, and Indian novelist and columnist Nilanjana S. Roy — narrowed it to six.

Five of the six shortlisted authors are women; four of the six translators are women. The books originate in Bulgarian, French, German, Mandarin Chinese and Portuguese, and their authors and translators collectively represent eight nationalities across Europe, Asia, North America and South America. The list is also dominated by independent British publishers, consolidating the prize’s reputation as a showcase for small, translation-focused presses.

The 2026 International Booker shortlist

Alongside Taiwan Travelogue, published in English by Sheffield-based And Other Stories and translated from Mandarin by Lin King, the shortlist includes:

• The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin (Scribe UK).
• She Who Remains by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel (Peirene Press).
• The Director by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin (riverrun).
• On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan (Charco Press).
• The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump (MacLehose Press).

Taken together, the novels are preoccupied with what happens when individual freedoms — “to create art, to love, to protest, to live without fear,” as the prize organizers put it — are constrained by states, customs or history.

“Taiwan Travelogue”: empire, food and intimacy

Taiwan Travelogue, already a winner of Taiwan’s Golden Tripod Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature, is framed as the newly translated memoir of a Japanese novelist sent on a government-sponsored tour of colonial Taiwan in the 1930s. In reality, it is a contemporary Mandarin-language novel that uses food, travel writing and a same-sex love story to examine the island’s complex relationship with Japanese rule.

Taiwan’s attitude to that past, author Yáng has said, is a “conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia,” unlike the more uniformly resentful view of Japanese imperialism common in Korea. Through the relationship between the visiting writer and her Taiwanese interpreter, she set out “to untangle the complex circumstances that Taiwan’s people faced in the past, and to explore what kind of future we ought to strive toward.”

Translator Lin King said she was drawn to the novel precisely because it refuses to reduce history to unrelenting tragedy. “Even under oppression, people still have humor, good food, movies, school, petty fights and romance,” she said. Historical fiction that is “strictly miserable,” she argued, fails to capture the full reality of life under empire.

Revolution, complicity and confinement

If Yáng’s novel looks at empire through cuisine and intimacy, Bazyar’s The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran traces its effects through revolution and exile. The German-language novel follows an Iranian family over four decades, from the 1979 Iranian Revolution to their life as refugees in West Germany and a return visit around the 2009 Green Movement protests.

Bazyar has said she began the book to understand her parents’ political past in Iran and their flight to Europe, interviewing them extensively about their experiences. The novel, told in four distinct voices, explores what the judges called a “dream of freedom that never dies,” even as regimes change and new forms of repression emerge.

Where Bazyar looks at revolution from below, Austrian-German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director examines complicity from above, through the story of filmmaker G.W. Pabst in the years leading up to and during World War II. Returning from Hollywood to Nazi-controlled Europe, Pabst is gradually drawn into making films for the regime.

Kehlmann has said he was interested less in “monstrous villains” than in “everyday complicities” — the “small workplace bargains,” club meetings and “casual blindness” that can add up to collaboration. Translator Ross Benjamin described complicity in the novel as “a series of smaller moves that gradually become muscle memory,” in a narrative that blends “nightmare and slapstick, evil and absurdity.”

Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia’s short, stark novel On Earth As It Is Beneath turns from propaganda to punishment. Set in a remote Brazilian penal colony built on land that once held a slave plantation, the book depicts a prison where, each full moon, the warden releases inmates into the wilderness only to hunt them down.

The judges called the novella “brutal, haunting and hypnotic,” a story in which “the boundaries between justice and cruelty collapse.” Maia has said she wanted “to talk about the prison system. Not to judge it, but to try and get a deeper understanding of it,” adding that after reflecting on prisons in Brazil and overseas, she came to feel that “beyond the application of laws to criminals, in the end, we are all imprisoned in this world, with walls that may or may not be visible.”

Gender, domestic power and the supernatural

Two other shortlisted titles push the list toward intimate explorations of gender and domestic power.

She Who Remains, by Bulgarian author Rene Karabash, is set in a contemporary tribal community in the Albanian Alps. Its protagonist, Bekja, escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a “sworn virgin” — a woman who assumes a male social role under the customary law known as the Kanun. The judges praised the book as an “exquisitely written, brilliantly observed story” in which a blood feud triggers Bekja’s search for self-determination.

Karabash has said the idea came after seeing a photo exhibition about sworn virgins, whose “female energy” she felt was meant to be erased yet visibly persisted. She spent two years researching before writing the novel in what she described as “a single breath.”

French author Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, meanwhile, brings magic into a 1990s housing development. Originally published in French in 1996 and translated into English for the first time this year, the novel follows Lucie, a mediocre witch trapped in an unhappy marriage, and her twin daughters, whose powers outstrip her own.

The judges called it a “darkly comic and beautifully crafted” work in which magic and realism collide in an “unconventional exploration of motherhood.” NDiaye, who later won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, has said she wanted a “contemporary witch” who is “not very confident in her gift… a poor witch who struggles with that power she never asked for,” drawing on her experience of raising three small children at the time.

A showcase for independent publishers

For the publishing industry, the 2026 shortlist confirms the central role of small houses in bringing translated literature to English-language readers. Edinburgh-based Charco Press, London-based Scribe UK, Bath-based Peirene Press and And Other Stories join translation-heavy imprints MacLehose Press and riverrun on the list. Several have appeared on previous International Booker shortlists; Peirene and riverrun are represented for the first time.

It is also a marker for the prize itself. This is the 10th year since the International Booker moved to its current annual format in 2016, honoring a single translated work rather than a body of work. Recent winners have included German writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and Indian author Banu Mushtaq’s story collection Heart Lamp.

As the judges reread their six finalists ahead of the May ceremony, Brown said they continued to find “hope, insight and burning humanity” in novels steeped in dictatorship, revolution, slavery and confinement.

The shortlist, she suggested, is less a catalog of past horrors than a map of how people have navigated power they did not choose — a map that, for readers picking up these books in English for the first time, feels unusually, and deliberately, timely.