A year after Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq won the International Booker Prize for her short story collection, Heart Lamp, becoming only the second Indian writer to have received the £50,000 literary honour after Geetanjali Shree (2022) for her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand), the best-known award for translated fiction has once again turned its gaze away from the dominant geographies familiar to Western readers.
This year, the spotlight has turned toward the literary tradition of a country that has been robust for decades, but has somehow eluded the global attention it so richly deserves.
By awarding Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue (And Other Stories/Pan Macmillan India), translated by Lin King, which has become the first Mandarin-language novel to win the International Booker Prize, the Booker Prize Foundation has opened a door onto an island, long overlooked by publishing ecosystem, whose people, as Yáng has said in an interview to The Guardian, have been suffering from “an identity crisis.”
The author told Emma Loffhagen: “Some of us believe ourselves to be Chinese and then others believe that we are Taiwanese, and I wanted to express that somehow through my book. As Taiwanese people, we need to ask ourselves now — do we want to go back to being colonised? Do we want to have to live like that again? Be second-class citizens in our own land? I refuse.”