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."
Sohrab was born and educated in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He studied for a B.Tech. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and followed up with an M.C.E. at the University of Delaware, Newark. After several years as a programmer-analyst contracted to Fortune 100 companies such as Ford Motor Company in Detroit, he heard his calling to become a writer.
He studied for an M.A. in English, with a concentration in creative writing, at the University of North Florida. He then taught literature and creative writing at UNF, from 1993 to 2003, passing on his knowledge and experience to aspiring writers. He still leads a summer fiction workshop there, at the annual UNF Writers Conference. From 1994 to 2001 he functioned as Fiction and Poetry Editor of 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.
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/Fiction. His collection, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America, was selected that year as 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 university literature classrooms. 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 went on to be selected one of the year's Most Beautiful Books by the German Foundation for Book Art (see the Books page).
Sohrab has been working on a novel unambitiously titled No Simple World. An excerpt in story form, "Distant Vision," has been published in the Fall 2009 issue of Slice Magazine and is currently nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Another excerpt, "Country Roads," has appeared in the fiction issue of South Asian Review. He still occasionally employs his skills as a professor of creative writing and literature: in 2004 he was invited to be Visiting Writer in Residence at Augsburg College, Minneapolis; in 2006 he was an artist in residence at the Seaside Institute, Florida (see the Blog page); in the summer of 2007 he was an artist in residence at the renowned artists' community of Yaddo (see pics & links on Blog page) in upstate New York; and in 2008-9 he presented papers at academic conferences in San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia. He is living his dream, enjoying a full and interesting life as a writer.
