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.”A Partner in TaiwanLiterature Born in the Shadow of ChinaTaiwan has lived in the shadow of China since World War II, but despite its complicated political position, it has developed one of the most lively and diverse literary cultures in the Chinese-speaking world. Taiwanese writers have produced important novels, essays, poetry, and experimental fiction that showcase the island’s unique history and identity. Even so, many of these writers remain surprisingly under read internationally.One major reason is the lack of high-quality translations, which has limited the reach of Taiwanese literature. But translation is only part of the story. Taiwan itself has often been viewed internationally as a territory caught between larger powers.Following his recent bilateral summit in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping, US President Donald Trump referred to the democratic island as the “Taiwan problem”, a phrase that seems to endorse Beijing’s typical rhetoric; the US has subsequently placed its $14 billion defensive arms package for Taiwan, which Trump sees as being treated as a bargaining chip in his ongoing negotiations with China, on a temporary “pause.” Yáng is acutely attuned to the politics over her country and her novel is an attempt to reclaim the island. “Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics. But I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown,” Yáng said in her acceptance speech.A Queer Colonial RomanceWhile Chinese writers like Yu Hua, Mo Yan, and Can Xue have been extensively translated, perhaps it’s over its politics that Taiwan Travelogue was rejected by several publishers in the UK until And Other Stories, an indie press that spotlights contemporary writing from across the world which also published Mushtaq, picked it up.A queer love story between two women wrapped in clever layers, it uses the structure of a novel-within-a-novel. Set in May 1938, it follows young Japanese novelist Aoyama Chizuko as she arrives in Japanese-ruled Taiwan. Invited by the colonial government for a lecture tour, she skips the official banquets and imperialist events and sets out to explore real island life and as much local food as her “monstrous appetite” can handle. A younger Taiwanese woman, Ō Chizuru (Chi-chan), becomes her interpreter and guide. As they travel by train, eat braised pork rice, winter melon tea, and other dishes, and explore the island through summer, autumn, winter, and spring, Chizuko grows infatuated. Chi-chan is charming, erudite, and devoted to her wishes around food, but she keeps a careful distance. Only after a painful separation does Chizuko begin to understand why.The novel is framed as a rediscovered Japanese travelogue, with footnotes, introductions, and Afterwords that add context. It works beautifully as both a romance and a sharp look at power, language, history, and colonialism. “With sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists, this novel was impossible to put down. Taiwan Travelogue pulls off an incredible double act: it succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel,” the jury noted. Yáng, who also writes essays, manga and video game scripts, has asserted that the work changed her life: “my savings went down; my weight went up.”Ai Weiwei’s Debut India Solo Show Is Bold, but Noticeably CarefulTaiwan’s Literary PowerhouseYáng is part of a continuum of contemporary fiction writers from Taiwan who cover a lot of ground: realism, science fiction, nature writing, personal struggle, and social critique. If you ask me, Wu Ming-Yi (54) is perhaps the most internationally admired young Taiwanese writer working today. Wu is also a painter, photographer, butterfly scholar, environmental activist, traveller, and teacher. All these selves seem to flow into his fiction. His books, written in Traditional Chinese, are shot through with carefully observed details acquired over years of looking at forests, coastlines, insects, weather patterns, and damaged cities. His writing has been compared to that of Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, W.G. Sebald, and Yann Martel. Wu Ming-YiHis breakthrough novel, The Man with the Compound Eyes (2013), now reads almost prophetically. Written years before climate anxiety became mainstream literary currency, it imagines a massive vortex of plastic garbage crashing into Taiwan’s shores. Besides its ecological preoccupation, it is also about loneliness, grief, migration, and the various ways human beings remain connected even when the world feels broken. The Stolen Bicycle (2017), which was long-listed for the International Booker Prize (then known as The Man Booker International Prize) in 2018, begins with a writer’s search for his father’s missing bicycle and unfolds into a meditation on war, colonialism, memory, photography, and Taiwanese identity itself. Japanese colonial cycling clubs, butterfly collectors, soldiers conscripted during World War II, forgotten fathers, everything becomes connected.Writing Ordinary Taiwanese Lives Became PoliticalIf you want to understand Taiwan before the economic miracle, read Huang Chun-ming (91). Born in 1935 in the rural northeast, Huang writes about farmers, fishermen, sex workers, and small-town dreamers with enormous warmth and zero sentimentality. Huang Chun-mingHis most famous story, ‘The Drowning of an Old Cat; (1967), follows an elderly farmer facing displacement as modernisation destroys his village. It’s devastating and funny and angry all at once. ‘A Flower in the Rainy Night’ captures the world of Taipei bar hostesses in the 1960s with empathy that was radical for its time. His portraits of Taiwanese society in short story collections like Raise the Bottles, and A Platform With No Timetable, both translated in 2021, are unsettling but also delightful. Huang writes in a style sometimes called “nativist”, which is steeped in Taiwanese soil, speech patterns and concerns. During the martial law era, this was considered to be quite political. Writing about ordinary Taiwanese lives meant insisting those lives mattered, at a time when official culture was hell bent on its connection to mainland China.Seventy-four-year-old Li Ang (the pen name of Shih Shu-tuan), a provocateur, burst onto the scene in 1983 with The Butcher’s Wife, a novella so shocking it was nearly banned. It tells the story of a woman in rural Taiwan who kills her abusive husband, a pig butcher, and dismembers his body using his own tools. Li AngThe book, which drew on a real 1930s murder case, is a fierce examination of patriarchy, women’s sexuality, political violence, social repression, and female rage, subjects that were once considered taboo in Chinese-language literature. She often writes about women trapped in conservative families, struggling to fulfil patriarchal expectations, and bodies — eating, sex, decay — in ways that force readers to confront what they’d rather gloss over. Her 2016 novel The Lost Garden explores Taiwan’s political history and the emotional lives of women living through social change.Another avant-garde writer, Wu He (the pen name of Chen Kuo-cheng meaning ‘dancing crane’), also 74, explores trauma, madness, and violence in Taiwanese history. He is best known for his masterpiece Remains of Life (1999), which examines the 1930 Musha Incident, the bloodiest indigenous uprising against Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan when Seediq warriors rose against the colonisers and were nearly annihilated in response. He moved to the Seediq village of Qingliu to research and write, and Remains of Life captures his wandering thoughts, conversations with survivors’ descendants, and struggles to understand historical trauma from the outside. It’s frustrating and hypnotic and unlike anything else you’d have read about Taiwan.Wu HeA Literature Shaped by Trauma, Memory, and SurvivalTranslated by Michael Berry, Remains of Life is written in a single 350-page sentence; there are no chapters, and the punctuation is minimal. “Remains of Life is not only bold in terms of its subject matter and social engagement but also noteworthy as a work of brilliant literature. Continuing the tradition of the great stream-of-consciousness novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses and José Saramago’s The Cave, Wu He’s novel presents a major breakthrough in structure, syntax, and Introduction/linguistic experimentation. Unprecedented in the Chinese literary world, Remains of Life contains no paragraph divisions and employs only a few dozen periods over the course of its sprawling narrative; it has been hailed as an important linguistic milestone,” writes Berry in his introduction.Qiu Miaojin, who also wrote in Mandarin, died by suicide in 1995 at 26, leaving behind two novels that transformed Taiwanese queer literature: Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Last Words from Montmartre, published posthumously in 1996. Notes of a Crocodile follows a group of queer students at National Taiwan University and their quests for love and real identity. The “crocodile” becomes a metaphor for queerness, something monstrous to society, hidden beneath the surface. Last Words from Montmartre, her final work that’s unbearably intimate, is an experimental suicide note in novel form, written during her last months in Paris. Qiu’s influence on younger Taiwanese writers, especially queer writers, is enormous: it’s evident in Yáng’s novel as well. She wrote about lesbian desire with an intensity and specificity that had no precedent in Chinese-language literature.Taiwan is a democracy of over 23 million people that most of the world doesn’t officially recognise, living under an existential threat in the penumbra of authoritarianism. This precariousness shapes its literature. Taiwanese writers ask questions that resonate beyond the island: What do we owe to the past? How do we live with histories we didn’t choose? What makes a home? They also write beautifully about the physical place: its mountains, coasts, cities, and night markets. Reading them, you encounter a Taiwan more layered and unambiguous than you find in the headlines. (The author is a Delhi-based senior culture journalist. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. 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