Excerpt from The Bookseller Daily,
15th October 2025:
Taiwan’s perfect day: why the nation’s writers are proving a worldwide success
If there was a moment that Taiwanese literature truly announced itself on the world rights-trading stage, it might well have been with the cascade of deals over the past year for Lee Chia-Ying's A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven. Since becoming a bestseller and winning an armful of awards in Taiwan after its 2024 release, Lee's genre-busting novel has been one of the hottest titles across the globe, selling into 16 territories to date.
"I knew immediately that [A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven] would have a huge international appeal," says Emily Chuang. founder of Taipei-based Emily Publishing founder of Taipei-based Emily Publishing Company and Emily Books Agency, who is Lee's primary literary agent. "First, it is a very relatable book about human connections and the biggest moments of people's lives, but it is also darkly funny. And the title is perfect as it references Sylvia Plath's death - that was a good entry point for editors, particularly Western editors. And it is also a book about writing, which a lot of editors love."
Chuang was not wrong. She began selling rights in earnest at the 2025 London Book Fair and within five days had more than 20 bids on the table. Chung says: "We had offers from the Netherlands, Italy, German, Spain, France, Denmark... Northern Europe in particular can be very slow to sell into, but we sewed up16 languages in three months. I've never seen a Taiwanese literary novel sell so fast." 2
Chuang likens Taiwan now to the moment Japanese cosy fantasy and crime took the world by storm. Chuang ought to know - in addition to authors in her native country, she reps more than 50 Japanese writers, many of whom (Satoshi Yagisawa, Sosuke Natsukawa, Uketsu) are the biggest bestsellers in this space. Indeed, there is a decent argument to be had that the current Japanese fiction in translation trend would not have happened without Chuang brokering deals from East to West. She says: "It feels like the time in 2018/19 when I really started selling Japanese books internationally. I got the sense then that readers in the West wanted something new, and what we call Japanese healing fiction' was it. Foreign publishers are now asking what the 'next Japan may be. I think it is going to be Taiwan."
