‘The Stand-In Family’ Wins Mirror Fiction Grand Prize at Taiwan Creative Content Fest

Mirror Fiction, a Taiwanese literary IP developer and production company, announced the winners of its fifth annual Mirror Fiction Award and unveiled five projects for its 2027 slate at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF).

The NT$1 million Grand Prize was awarded to Iris Kong for “The Stand-In Family,” a suspense novel featuring four strangers who pose as a family inside a house where a murder has occurred. Under the watchful eyeседнев眼光 of a property developer, one of the impostors is forced to confront a past wrongdoing.

“This award was a clear goal for me when I created the story,” said Kong, an engineer by profession. “I had written other works before, but adapting them for the screen would have been too expensive. So this time, I started with a realistic setting and considered production costs from the beginning.”

The NT$700,000 Judges’ Award went to Malaysian writer Liang Xuan for “Endless Rain.” Both winning works are eligible for publication and potential screen adaptation through Mirror Fiction.

Tung Cheng‑yu, CEO of Mirror Fiction, said the award is designed to encourage writers and introduce promising literary properties to investors. “I believe that only when you genuinely fall in love with a story can you make the best adaptation,” she said. “Adapting a novel for the screen is much easier than starting from scratch because the novel already has an established world.” She added that films adapted from books draw more than 40 % higher attendance than original films, while TV content shows a difference exceeding 60 %. The source of these figures was not disclosed.

The fifth edition of the award received 529 submissions totaling over 40 million Chinese characters, with winners selected through multiple rounds of judging.

In the showcase’s second half, Mirror Fiction sales director Sharleen Liu introduced five literary projects slated for the company’s 2027 IP lineup.

Leading the lineup is “036037,” a contemporary romance novel by Kevin Chen, whose previous work “Ghost Town” has been published in English. The story follows two middle‑aged characters revisiting a relationship from more than two decades earlier, exploring regret and the possibility of moving on. The novel has already secured a screen‑adaptation deal, and a four‑volume print edition is scheduled for December.

“The Midnight Masseuse: A Taipei Noir,” by Tommy Tan, opens with the murder of a female massage therapist and evolves into a crime thriller that exposes tangled connections among police officers, prosecutors, politicians, and business interests.

“Double Diplomacy,” by Daniel Hsieh, tells the story of two brothers—an ambassador and a criminal strategist—who exchange identities. Their encounters with each other’s worlds draw them into a diplomatic crisis involving international negotiations and organized crime.

“Red‑Haired Inibs,” by Indigenous writer and historian Nakao Eki Pacidal, follows a girl of mixed Indigenous and Dutch ancestry in 17th‑century Taiwan. Inibs were female priests of the Indigenous Siraya people. Her quest to find her father becomes a journey into identity, belonging, and the lives of people omitted from official histories.

The slate is rounded out by Kong’s “The Stand‑In Family.”

Mirror Fiction, which develops literary properties for publication and cross‑media adaptation, has also expanded into film and television investment and production. Its credits include the Netflix series “The Victims’ Game,” winner of Taiwan’s Golden Bell Awards, as well as investments in Chung Mong‑hong’s “The Falls” (Taiwan’s Oscar submission) and the horror film “The Rope Curse 3.”

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