Our book club welcomes people from all round the world for a discussion about a piece of literature which has recently been translated into English. We meet on Zoom each month during Trinity's term time. Admission is free, and participants may join as and when it suits. In September, we will be discussing:

Taiwan Travelogue

by Yáng Shuang-zi, translated from Mandarin by Lin King. 

Winner of the 2026 International Booker PrizeWinner of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Winner of the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize for Outstanding Translated Literature from Chinese Language

[From the book's cover]

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.

Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026 for Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a Taiwanese writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism

Taiwan Travelogue, her first book to be translated into English, won the National Book Award for Literature in Translation in 2024 and Asia Society’s inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize. It has been published or is forthcoming in numerous languages including Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Italian, German, Dutch, Danish, and Greek.

Lin King is a writer and translator based in Taipei and New York. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, Joyland, and PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, among others. Her debut novel, Weeb (Holt US, Head of Zeus UK), is forthcoming April 2027. Translation rights have been sold in Taiwan and Korea.

Translations include the graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin (Levine Querido), the chapbook Cloud Labour by Sabrina Huang (Strangers Press), and the novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-Zi (Graywolf US, And Other Stories UK).

For her translation of Taiwan Travelogue, King received the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature, the 2024 Baifang Schell Book Prize from the Asia Society, the 2025 First Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association, and the 2026 International Booker Prize. Forthcoming translations include A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven by Lee Chia-Ying (Doubleday UK, Riverhead US, January 2027).

If you enjoy events about literary translation, take a look at what else we have planned at the Centre, here.