Your weekly edit
This week: reflections on the International Booker Prize, fiction for foodies, the best sapphic love stories, and your last chance to enter our Children’s Booker Prize competition
An admission: we’ve been a little tired this week. As we write to you, London is emerging from an unseasonal heatwave. Everyone knows British people talk about the weather all the time, but this week we’ve had good reason. Wednesday saw record-breaking UK temperatures for May (35C): it was warmer here than Brazil, Germany, Bulgaria, Iran and Taiwan, among many other places. No wonder the pace of office life at Booker Prizes HQ (huge windows, no air-con) has been slightly slower than usual.
We have, however, been busy reflecting on our highlight of 2026 so far: last week’s glitzy and joyful International Booker Prize ceremony at Tate Modern, which saw Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King, become the first book translated from Taiwanese Mandarin to win the International Booker. If you missed our livestream, you can watch the winning moment – and the winners’ speeches – here. We’ve posted some photos from the ceremony below, too.
And if you haven’t yet read the book and would like to discover more about it, you’ll find plenty of resources on the Booker Prizes website, including an extract to whet your appetite, interviews with the author and translator, and a comprehensive reading guide, full of insights, information and discussion points.
The International Booker Prize 2026 ceremony in pictures
Booker-nominated novels that are perfect for foodies
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 judges praised the book’s ‘sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists’, describing it as ‘both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel’. And it’s not the only book in the Booker Library with food at its heart.
Whether it’s rice noodles in a pork-bone broth, a roast turkey dinner, otter with lobster sauce, or kipper fillets with lemon juice, the 11 Booker-nominated novels on this list describe a range of delicious, unusual and occasionally disastrous meals. We’ve even suggested recipes to complement each book, inspired by the dishes they describe – although we recommend you try some of them at your own risk.
Booker-nominated books that explore sapphic love
Taiwan Travelogue – which explores the love between two women through food, language and history – has also inspired our second reading list this week.
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and Lin King’s win prompted us to look through the Booker Library and delve into some of its best explorations of sapphic love. With Pride Month just around the corner, what better time to profile these books.
From Victorian England to 1930s Taiwan – and from the Netherlands in the mid-20th century to modern-day Albania – these Booker- and International Booker-nominated novels don’t just span history and geography, they also chart intricate emotional depths.
International Booker Prize nominees on their favourite childhood reads
As International Booker Prize season draws to a close, our attention will soon be shifting towards our two other prizes. The longlist for the Booker Prize 2026 will be announced in less than two months’ time (on 28 July), and we’re hard at work planning our inaugural Children’s Booker Prize, the shortlist for which will be announced on 24 November.
With the latter in mind, 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.
Your last chance to enter our Children’s Booker Prize child judge competition
There are only a few days left to enter our competition to help us find three child judges for the inaugural Children’s Booker Prize. We’re looking for three children, aged between eight and 12 years old and living in the UK, to join our adult judges – Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Lolly Adefope and Sanchita Basu De Sarkar – in choosing the winner from a shortlist of eight books later this year. The process will ensure the winning book is a recommendation from young readers to their peers.
Parents, carers and educators have until Tuesday 2 June to enter the competition on behalf of their children, pupils and young people.
The successful child entrants will each get: the eight shortlisted books to read and keep; a judges’ medal; a trip to London for a fun day choosing the winner with the adult judges; a bespoke portrait by Beano illustrator Nigel Parkinson; a Beano comic strip capturing their judging experience; and another trip to London for the Children’s Booker Prize 2027 ceremony at Young V&A, which will feature a red carpet with VIP guests, entertainment stations, and the chance to present the winner/s with their trophy live on stage.
The three child judges will be announced alongside the shortlist on Tuesday, 24 November 2026. Good luck!
Have you read Taiwan Travelogue and do you think it’s a worthy winner? Could you recommend any other works of fiction for foodies, or novels that explore sapphic love? What was your favourite childhood read? Let us know in the comments!
No I do not think it was a worthy winner I much Preferred The Duke or definitely She who remains Booker International appears to be focused on politics or LGBTQ what about a great story
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