Taiwan Travelogue, written by Yang Shuang-zi and translated by Lin King, has won the 2026 International Booker Prize — the first Taiwanese work ever to receive the award! It had already claimed the 2024 U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature, also a first for Taiwanese literature.Set in 1938 under Japanese colonial rule, the novel moves from food and railway travel to a tender friendship between two women — one colonizer, one colonized — across the Taiwan-Japan divide. Beneath its gentlest of stories lies its sharpest question: "The Taiwanese — who are they, really?"The two award-winners join us at the Zhiding Lecture Hall for a deep, three-generation conversation with Chairman Tsao. From a childhood in the military dependents' villages, to a freedom and democracy taken for granted from birth; from the old tensions of provincial origin, to the distinction between "culture" and "civilization," and the identity politics embedded in language and translation. As the formative memories and historical experiences of different generations meet here, the question of "Taiwanese identity" is laid open anew and examined from every side.

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