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Iris Kong Wins Mirror Fiction Grand Prize at Taiwan Creative Content Fest

Jonah VillalbaPublished 12m ago2 min readBased on 6 sources
Iris Kong Wins Mirror Fiction Grand Prize at Taiwan Creative Content Fest
Image by kaboompics from Pixabay

Iris Kong has won the Grand Prize of the fifth Mirror Fiction Award, worth NT$1 million ($32,000), for a suspense novel called "The Stand-In Family" (a provisional title). The winners were announced at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF), according to Variety.

The book is about four strangers who pretend to be a family inside a house where a murder has taken place. It is the kind of premise that film and TV buyers look for: a tight setting, a secret at the centre, and a cast of characters who do not trust each other.

A second prize, the Judges' Award of NT$700,000 ($22,500), went to Malaysian writer Liang Xuan for "Endless Rain" (also a provisional title). Both winning works can now be developed for print publication and for screen adaptation through Mirror Fiction, the Taiwan-based online platform for original novels, comics and story creation.

The competition drew 529 submissions. Together they ran to more than 40 million Chinese characters, a figure the company gave to Variety. Entries were judged on story rather than on a fixed format, so the shortlist covered a wide range of genres.

Mirror Fiction also used the fest to show its plans for 2027. The company unveiled five projects for its slate of source material, which studios and producers can turn into books, series and films. Kong's novel is on the list alongside four others:

  • "036037," a contemporary romance by Kevin Chen.
  • "The Midnight Masseuse: A Taipei Noir" by Tommy Tan.
  • "Double Diplomacy" by Daniel Hsieh, about two brothers who swap identities.
  • "Red-Haired Inibs" by Nakao Eki Pacidal, which follows a girl of mixed Indigenous and Dutch ancestry in 17th-century Taiwan.

The slate reaches well beyond thrillers. Mirror Fiction's own site lists genres from romance and history to sci-fi, wuxia martial-arts tales, horror and LGBT stories, so a single project can end up with a very different audience depending on who picks it up. The company has already seen one of its works reach the screen. Variety reports that Mirror Fiction developed the Netflix series "The Victims' Game."

Why this matters for a general reader: a novel published online in Taiwan can travel. A prize pot of a few tens of thousands of dollars is small by Hollywood standards, but it puts a book in front of producers who are always hunting for the next story. Whether any of these projects reaches a cinema or a streaming app is not yet known.

Tung Cheng-yu is the chief executive of Mirror Fiction. The company's next step will be the work of turning these five titles into finished projects, a process that often takes years.

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