The English translation of Yang Shuang-zi’s (楊双子) Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄) has been longlisted for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Set in 1930s Taiwan, the novel, translated from Chinese by Lin King (金翎), “follows a fictional Japanese writer and her relationship with the charming yet closed-off Taiwanese woman who serves as her interpreter,” an announcement posted on Tuesday on the US National Book Foundation’s Web site said.
The book “unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships,” a summary provided by the US publisher on the award site said.
Photo: screen grab from the National Book Foundation Web site
The novel was published by Springhill Publishing in Taiwan in 2020, with Graywolf Press to release the English translation in the US on Nov. 12, the Taipei Cultural Center in New York wrote on Facebook.
It was chosen as one of the 10 translated works in the longlist among 141 nominations, it said.
Yang was originally a shared pseudonym for twin sisters Yang Jo-tzu (楊若慈) and Yang Jo-hui (楊若暉). The elder sister, Yang Jo-tzu, was responsible for writing the books while the younger sister did the historical research and Japanese translations.
The characters for Shuang-zi in Japanese Kanji means “twins.”
After her younger sister died from cancer in 2015, Yang Jo-hui continued with the pseudonym to honor her sister.
King, who was born in the US, but grew up in Taiwan, has also won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the National Book Foundation Web site says.
Finalists for the award would be revealed on Oct. 1, and the winner announced live at the awards ceremony on Nov. 20, The Associated Press reported.
The National Book Awards, now in its 75th year, established the translated literature category in 1967.
The awards were counted as “the world’s most prestigious literary prizes” by the New York Times, together with the Booker Prize (formerly the Man Booker Prize) and the Nobel Prize for Literature, the foundation’s site says.
In May, the Japanese version of the novel, translated by Yuko Miura, became the first Taiwanese work to win Japan’s Best Translation Award.
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