Lin King
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Writer, translator; Taipei, New York; speaks English, Mandarin, Japanese; only on Threads for the memes
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Articles by Lin King
Inside And Other Stories: The Sheffield-based small press taking translated fiction to a global stage
And Other Stories base their offices in Sheffield’s City Library, behind the Steel City’s metalwork archives. They are a one-of-a-kind independent press. With back-to-back International Booker Prize wins for Heart Lamp in 2025 and Taiwan Travelogue earlier this year, And Other Stories is forging an exciting future for translated fiction on a global stage.
Journey to the interior • Antonia Finnane
When the International Booker Prize committee awarded this year’s prize to Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue it continued a laudable tradition of diversity. In the eleven years since its relaunch in 2016, the prize has gone to books translated from eleven different languages. Taiwan Travelogue, a Chinese-language novel brought to the English-reading public in a thoughtful translation by Lin King, is the prize’s first Chinese-language recipient.
Bridges and bean buns
Taiwan Travelogue opens, almost prophetically, with a misunderstanding, the easiest of the many misunderstandings that await its two protagonists. Aoyama Chizuko, a celebrated Japanese novelist on a government-sponsored lecture tour in Taiwan, deliberately strays into a bustling market instead of waiting at the station where she is meant to be picked up. Curious and impulsive, she ends up bickering with a teenage vendor whose language she cannot understand.
International Booker-nominated authors and translators on their favourite books from childhood
Authors and translators shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025 and 2026 tell us about the books they loved when they were young With submissions for the first-ever Children’s Booker Prize now open – and our UK-wide competition to find three child judges underway –we asked authors and translators shortlisted for the International Booker in 2025 and 2026 to tell us about the books that ignited their love of reading when they were children. Here’s what they said.
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Discover some of the best sapphic love stories that have been nominated for the Booker and International Booker Prizes, with 10 intoxicating tales of self-discovery and seduction Written by Grace Sansom Publication date and time: Published May 27, 2026 Taiwan Travelogue, the winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, sumptuously explores the love between two women through food, language and history.
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Some authors can make us feel hungry with words alone, vividly describing dishes that will make your stomach rumble. Food in books often has a symbolic meaning, too, used to express love, gain favour, create a sense of comfort or explore cultural identity. Taiwan Travelogue, winner of this year’s International Booker Prize, is, among many things, a mouthwatering account of a culinary journey through late 1930s Taiwan.
The Best Fiction Books: The 2026 International Booker Prize
We’re here to discuss the shortlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize. It’s a really interesting selection of books. Was it difficult to cut the longlist down to size? Thank you! Arriving at the shortlist was incredibly hard because the longlist was full of books that were ambitious, intelligent and deeply alive to the complexities of the world we’re living in.
People need to quadruple exercise level to achieve optimal heart benefit – study
Adults are advised to exercise for at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each week. Exercising for up to 610 minutes a week – around four times the recommended minimum amount – could give people “optimal” heart benefits linked to physical activity, a new study suggests. Adults are advised to exercise for at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity each week – the equivalent of two and a half hours of running, cycling or brisk walking.
Former MAFS UK psychologist says series should not have been broadcast
Two women on the show have the accused the men they were partnered with of rape. A former Married At First Sight UK psychologist has said she does not think the series should have been broadcast, after women made allegations of rape and sexual assault. Shona Manderson accused her on-screen partner of sexual misconduct while on the Channel 4 show, while two other women alleged they were raped by their on-screen husbands, while speaking in a BBC Panorama documentary.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King, wins the International Booker Prize 2026
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, is named the 2026 winner of the International Booker Prize supported by Bukhman Philanthropies Publication date and time: Published 19 May 2026 - 22:14 BST Taiwan Travelogueis the first book translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker Prize The winning author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese and American winners of the prize The winning book,...
Everything you need to know about Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026
As the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize is announced, here’s the lowdown on the triumphant book, its author and translator Publication date and time: Published May 19, 2026 Why did Taiwan Travelogue win? Natasha Brown, Chair of judges, said: ‘Can love overcome a power imbalance? Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, teases out the nuances of this question against a backdrop of 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule.
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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 – is hired as her interpreter.
An extract from Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King
“Hold on. What’s going on here?” I couldn’t help but voice the thought out loud. For, in that moment, I seemed to have been transported back into the midst of Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu’s Magic Troupe. I’d crossed paths with Tenkatsu’s troupe long ago, before I’d started high school. They had been on tour, and on the day they arrived in Nagasaki, my aunt Kikuko and I happened upon the opening parade.
Taiwan Travelogue | The Booker Prizes
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2026, Taiwan Travelogue is a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history and power 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.
Kate McKinnon Hosts 2024 National Book Awards Original
Host Kate McKinnon and fiction winner Percival Everett. Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty (2) The 2024 National Book Awards were presented to winners in fiction, nonfiction, young people's literature and translated literature, as well as awards for lifetime achievement and service to the literary community. Comedian and author Kate McKinnon emceed the event and Jon Batiste performed as the musical guest.
Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel
Aoyama Chizuko has “a monster’s appetite.” “When it comes to good food,” she says, “I will forever have room in my stomach.” The year is 1938. Chizuko, a successful author whose debut novel, A Record of Youth, has been made into a movie, has traveled from her home on Kyūshū, Japan’s third-largest island, for an all-expenses-paid lecture tour. Her destination: Taiwan, another island, located in the western Pacific Ocean off the southeastern coast of China.
THE BOY FROM CLEARWATER
by Pei-yun Yu ; illustrated by Jian-xin Zhou ; translated by Lin King ‧ An accessible, timely account of Taiwan’s struggles for democracy and human rights as experienced through a personal lens. The continuation of a true-life story translated from Taiwanese Hoklo, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese revisits Taiwan’s contemporary history and evolution as a civil society.
The Healing Song
Tío Ernesto was one of those men you hardly saw at parties, get-togethers, or important family occasions. The few times that I saw him, he nodded and smiled through teary eyes, clenched teeth, and alcohol breath, suckling on a caguama like a baby bottle, and slurring through a combat of memory that spooled over a song by Los Bukis. Yo te-e necesito. The words would evaporate out of him like gas as he passed his cold, wet hand through my hair.
Warm Juice - Boston Review
My mother has not slept for seven days. My father is arguably the one suffering most from this: she has not kept a rigid schedule ever since she reached pension age as a public school teacher, whereas he works for a local bank and is still going at it after forty-one years. According to him, she tosses and turns for the first few hours, then goes out to the living room and watches television at a daytime volume. (“It woke you up?
Our Last Night at the Carnival
Fidelia Each summer, Mom and I pool our money and make our annual pilgrimage to the carnival on the west side of La Puente. As a young girl, I was mesmerized by the flashing lights and loopy music, salty popcorn smells and sugary sodas, giant turkey legs and diamond rings tumbling inside plastic capsules. We had yet to tire of the dirty midway, the cheap toys, the wheezing Scrambler.
Ha-fu, Half, Halfie
The evening was a disaster. Danny’s date, Janet, had shown up in a revealing dress, a firework of greenish chiffon held together by zigzags of aquamarine beads. Danny had told her that it looked like the nest of a satin bowerbird—“The most beautiful bird’s nest in the world,” he’d said. “It’s an agreed-upon fact.” She had not looked pleased, and he in turn had been disappointed by her lukewarm response.
Ensoulment - Boston Review
“It’s a four-letter word, when it’s heard, it controls your body to dance—you got it—soul.” —Rakim Beau Bill was hella frightened of this thing called death. He had heard about it when the grown folks got together to gossip. He caught soundbites and tidbits on “What had happened was . .
The “I” in Murakami
Earlier this year, in Taipei, I paid the equivalent of US$20 for a T-shirt that says, in embroidered English letters: NORWEGIAN WOOD HARUKI MURAKAMI. It is one of eight designs from a collaboration between Uniqlo and Tokyo FM, which airs a show called Murakami Radio. Every two months or so, Murakami, aged 72, plays music he likes for 55 minutes. Consider how unlikely a premise this is for most other world-renowned novelists of his generation: DJ Atwood? McEwan Hour? And yet, Murakami pulls it off.
Humanities: Let the Hypothesis Testing Begin
Creative writers who publish in more “minor” languages (those less commonly spoken) are “condemned”—in the words of French literary critic Pascale Casanova—to defend and illustrate national history and controversies. But their counterparts, in cultural capitals like Paris or New York City, are free to explore more universal themes, whether of human existence or the nature of literature. Language, for Casanova, is literary destiny.
FACTOIDS - Litro Magazine USA
Photo credit: Lin King A fact about the chickenpox vaccine: Introduced in 1984, it became commercially available in the US in 1995. A story about the chickenpox vaccine: I was born in the US in 1993. I moved with my parents to Taipei in 1995. In the whirlwind of transatlantic relocation, I did not receive the chickenpox vaccine. In 2004, I transferred from a Mandarin-speaking public school to an English-speaking international school for the fifth grade and, in my first week, contracted chickenpox.
UC Berkeley needs to work towards zero waste by 2020
A UC Berkeley student picks up new clothes from the Amazon store and throws away all the packaging it came in, a staff administrator throws out their leftovers in the single-use plastic food clamshell while working at their desk, a faculty member bought their morning coffee in a disposable cup, and a visitor purchases a Cal souvenir the cashier puts in a disposable plastic bag.
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