Sohrab Homi Fracis is the first 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." He 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 1993-2003, passing on his knowledge and experience to aspiring writers. Since 2004 he has been the final judge and presenter of the Page Edwards Short Fiction Award at the Florida First Coast Writers' Festival.
Sohrab's fiction found publication in Other Voices, Chicago, India Currents, San Jose, The State Street Review, Jacksonville, The Antigonish Review, Nova Scotia, Weber Studies, Utah, The Toronto Review, Toronto, and most recently Ort der Augen, Germany. 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 as a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction that year. 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 German Books (see the Books page).
Sohrab is now working fulltime on a novel modestly titled A Man of the World. 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); and in the summer of 2007 he was an artist in residence at the legendary artists' community of Yaddo (see pics & links on Blog page) in upstate New York. He is living his dream, enjoying a full and interesting life as a writer.
