Yáng Shuāng-zǐ "Taiwan Travelogue" x Harbour Front Literaturfestival Hamburg

“Literature cannot be fundamentally separated from politics,” said Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-Zi at the awards ceremony at the Tate Modern in London, where she was awarded this year’s International Booker Prize.

She received the prestigious literary prize for the English translation of her novel “Taiwan Travelogue.” Set in Japanese-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s, the novel tells the love story of a Japanese author and her Taiwanese translator as they travel together across the country. In poetic and artful language, Yang Shuang-Zi describes, at first glance, a romantic journey through the country—then under Japanese occupation—where the two women delight in exploring the beauty and culinary diversity of the land. It is only upon closer inspection that the author’s literary sophistication becomes apparent: for it is the constraints of unequal power dynamics and colonialism that ultimately separate the lovers and keep them at a distance. Politics intrudes into the most private sphere. What does it really mean to try foreign food, and what happens to a relationship when the external dynamics of power relations subtly intrude into the two women’s conversations?

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese author, the novel sheds light on a long-neglected chapter of East Asian history and was a sensational success in Taiwan.

Yang Shuang-Zi(b. 1984) is a writer, essayist, and literary critic. “Yang Shuang-Zi” is her pseudonym and means “twins.” It refers to her late twin sister, with whom she originally shared the name.