Sohrab Homi Fracis is the first Asian author and still the only South Asian author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, juried through the legendary Iowa Writers' Workshop and described by the New York Times Book Review as "among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers." And there's nothing wrong with a little controversy, but just to put a recent one to rest, that also makes him the first Asian American to win the award.
Sohrab was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He moved across the country for a B.Tech. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and then across the world, on a scholarship, for an M.C.E. at the University of Delaware, Newark. Back when the only writing he did was handwriting, he sent a sample to a newspaper column in Detroit that analyzed readers' handwriting. The intrigued columnist shared his cursive sample with an analysts’ club. They unanimously declared his evolved Indian style to be a creative one, suggested he had unusual insights, and recommended that he share them with the world by -- what else? -- writing. After years as a systems analyst at Fortune 100 companies such as Ford, he happily accepted his calling to become a writer.
He went back to school for an M.A. in English, with a concentration in creative writing, at the University of North Florida. That made him the rare person with engineering and fiction theses in the library system. He then taught literature and creative writing at UNF, from 1993 to 2003. From 1994 to 2001 he was a fiction and poetry editor at the now sadly defunct State Street Review. From 2004 to 2008 he was the final judge and presenter of the Page Edwards Short Fiction Award at the also sadly defunct Florida First Coast Writers' Festival. Since 2009, he leads a summer fiction workshop at the happily thriving UNF Writers Conference (see Events page), passing on his knowledge and experience to aspiring writers.
Sohrab's fiction found publication in Other Voices, Chicago, India Currents, San Jose, State Street Review, Jacksonville, The Antigonish Review, Nova Scotia, Weber Studies, Utah, The Toronto Review, Toronto, Ort der Augen, Germany, and most recently, South Asian Review, Pennsylvania, and Slice Magazine, New York. Not counting a couple of letters to the editor in The New Yorker, his literary commentary has been in The Florida Times-Union, FEZANA Journal, and The News India-Times.
In 1999, he was awarded the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature. His collection, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America, was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In 2001, the book won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press, to glowing reviews. It has since been read and studied in several universities. In 2002, he was awarded a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Tennessee. That year, Ticket to Minto was released in India by Indialog Publications. Its German translation, by Thomas Loschner, was released by Mitteldeutscher Press at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair and was selected one of the year's Most Beautiful Books by the German Foundation for Book Art (see the Books page). The world had agreed with the handwriting analysts, and Sohrab is grateful to this day.
He has been working on a novel, Go Home, about the tug-of-war between cross-national tension and friendship. An excerpt, "Distant Vision," was published in Slice Magazine and nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize. Another excerpt, "Country Roads," appeared in South Asian Review. His writing takes him to various places. In 2004 he was Visiting Writer in Residence at Augsburg College, Minneapolis; in 2006 he was an artist in residence at Escape to Create, Seaside Institute, Florida (see the Blog page); in 2007 he was an artist in residence at the renowned art colony of Yaddo (see pics & links on Blog page) in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Yaddo selected him once again in 2010. He is living his dream, enjoying a full and interesting life as a writer.
