The 2026 International Booker Prize

The winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize is Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE. Translated by Lin King, it is the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prize.

The novel, which takes the form of a fictional translation of a rediscovered Japanese travel memoir, explores history, power, class, colonialism and love through the lens of two women’s culinary tour across Japan-controlled Taiwan in the 1930s. 

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Siri Hustvedt, author of Ghost Stories: A Memoir

GHOST STORIES is an intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-before-seen writing by Auster --- letters and notes to Siri and his last unfinished book addressed to his grandson, Letters to Miles. The memoir is both an elegy and a reckoning, a chronicle of personal loss that also bears witness to the sorrows of recent years --- the tragic deaths of Hustvedt’s stepson and granddaughter. Hustvedt explores how grief unmoors time, how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday, and how the body experiences the absence of love as a presence.

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Alex Finlay, author of The Anniversary

On May 1, 1992, Jules Delaney and Quinn Riley hardly know each other. Jules is high school queen bee in a small Midwestern town when she survives a brutal attack by the elusive May Day Killer --- a predator who strikes every May 1st. Quinn, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, is arrested the same night after trying to break up a fight and nearly killing someone. By morning, their lives are forever connected. A year later, Jules is tormented by one question: Why was she spared? Quinn is newly released from juvenile detention and returns home to devastating news --- the unsolved murder of his mother. Over the next decade, their lives are revisited on a single day each year: May 1st. As the years pass, secrets surface, lies unravel, and the paths of Jules and Quinn draw closer together.

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Christina Baker Kline, author of The Foursome

When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, everyone is eager to learn if the salacious rumors about them are true. Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it that they’re looking for wives --- and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge. Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing and identity in a world where everything --- including race, class and gender --- is rigidly defined.

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Louise Penny, author of The Last Mandarin

Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese American and former food blogger, has long lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li --- a Tiananmen Square dissident turned world-renowned human rights activist and passionate advocate for a free and democratic China. When security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world, setting off a panic, the signal is traced back to China. As world leaders scramble to respond, Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes that Madame Li can interpret the Chinese intentions. But why involve Alice? If China isn’t behind the attack, Vivien warns, someone even more dangerous is pulling the strings. Mother and daughter must join together to overcome their estrangement if they have any hope of preventing global catastrophe.

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