Sometimes it’s hard to know who your friends are, even when there aren’t any cultural barriers to overcome. In his work, Sohrab Homi Fracis documents his experience as an Indian immigrant adapting to American culture—the good, the bad, and the ugly—in the 1980s. Fracis, who now calls Jacksonville home, has gone on to gain recognition for his excellent work, but he walks through life with a perspective inextricably tied to his Asian roots, and the hostility of some Americans to anyone who looks, or speaks differently than them.

Listen to Fracis’s conversation with Darlyn Finch Kuhn on Scribbler’s Corner at River of Grass.

Fracis was the first Asian author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, which was for his 2001 collection, Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America. The book was also a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. A novella Adaptation of Ticket to Minto was a finalist in Screencraft’s Cinematic Story Contest.

Fracis’s 2017 novel, Go Home, was a finalist in the International Book Awards: Multicultural Fiction category, and it brought him the South Asian Litterary Associations’ Distinguished Achievement Award. The novel was shortlisted by Stanford University for the 2018 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His novel excerpt, “Distant Vision,” was nominated for a pushcart prize.