London - So, 'Taiwan Travelogue' wins the International Booker Prize. Big whoop. Apparently, it's some rediscovered (totally fictional, mind you) travel memoir from the 1930s, back when the Japanese were running Taiwan. Cue the violins.

Author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King are now the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners, respectively. Translation: they checked all the right boxes on the woke bingo card. Fifty grand richer, and all they had to do was regurgitate some pre-packaged victim narrative about colonialism. Easy money.

Natasha Brown, chair of the judges, called it “captivating, slyly sophisticated.” Translation: boring and pretentious. The book is supposedly both a romance and an “incisive postcolonial novel.” How many buzzwords can they cram into one description? It's a damn book, not the Magna Carta.

Yáng apparently wanted to compare how Koreans and Taiwanese feel about their Japanese overlords. “Koreans seem to feel uniformly resentful of that history, whereas Taiwanese people regard it with a much more conflicted mix of distaste and nostalgia.” Oh, the horror! People have mixed feelings? Groundbreaking.

Lin King, the translator, chimed in that she “personally dislike[s] historical fiction that is strictly miserable.” Well, good for her. Nobody wants to read a book that’s just depressing. But let's not pretend this isn't virtue signaling masquerading as art.

And of course, it’s a “queer historical romance.” Because why not throw in a little LGBTQ+ for good measure? Can't forget to tick off all the identity politics boxes! It's a wonder they didn't include a transgender indigenous non-binary protagonist in a wheelchair. Talk about checking all the boxes!

Out of 128 books submitted, this is the one they chose? Seriously? The other shortlisted books sound equally snooze-worthy. Shida Bazyar's 'The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran.' Ana Paula Maia's 'On Earth As It Is Beneath.' Marie NDiaye's 'The Witch.' Sounds like a competition for the most depressing book title.

Last year, some sob story about Muslim women in India won. See the pattern? The International Booker Prize isn’t about literary merit. It's about virtue signaling to the globalist elites, proving that you’re sufficiently “woke” and “inclusive.”