Lin King on 'Taiwan Travelogue' (Nominated for the International Booker Prize-2026)
Guest for this Episode is Writer, Translator Lin King -
Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York
Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, among others, and has received the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Translations include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin.
Her debut novel, Weeb, is forthcoming from Holt.
Her translation of the novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, which won the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature. 'Taiwan Travelogue' is longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
The Literary Trick: A Novel in Disguise:
The most fascinating aspect of Taiwan Travelogue is its structural deception. The book is presented not as a modern novel, but as a "rediscovered" historical artifact. It is disguised as a Mandarin Chinese translation of a fictitious Japanese original.
In the world of the novel, the text we are reading is supposedly a 1930s travelogue titled The Records of the Winter Dust, written by a famous (but fictitious) Japanese author named Chizuko Aoyama. Within the narrative, Aoyama is visiting Taiwan—then a colony of the Empire of Japan—to explore its local customs and cuisine and finds her interpreter Wang Chen-ho. (Japanese Name: O-Chizuru)
The Layered Narrative Structure
The Fictional Japanese Author: Chizuko Aoyama, a Japanese woman writing her observations of colonial Taiwan in Japanese.
The Fictional Mandarin Chinese Translator: Aoyama's lost manuscript is translated into Mandarin Chinese by her interpreter Wang Chen-ho.
The Real Author: Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, a contemporary Taiwanese writer who wrote the entire "discovery" in Mandarin.
The Real Translator: Lin King, who brings this trilingual, multi-layered "hoax" into English.
This nesting creates a profound psychological effect. By writing from the perspective of a Japanese colonizer, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ forces the reader to see Taiwan through an "outsider’s" lens, while simultaneously critiquing that lens through the modern footnotes provided by the "fictional translator."
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