FC2 is delighted to announce that final judge Kazim Ali has selected Curse Him, by Sophia Terazawa, as winner of the 2026 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. FC2 will publish Curse Him in the Fall of 2027.
Sophia Terazawa writes prose, poetry, and performance scores that investigate colonial memory, intergenerational haunting, and the incantatory possibilities of hybrid forms. Her debut novel, Tetra Nova (US: Deep Vellum, 2025; UK/Ireland: the87press, 2025) — a polyvocal fiction that moves between a mother’s exile from Saigon and a daughter’s reckoning in the American present — was adapted into a full ballet with the Roanoke Ballet Theatre and launched at Café OTO in London. She is also the author of three poetry collections: Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and Winter Phoenix: Testimonies in Verse (Deep Vellum, 2021). Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, The Cincinnati Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and many others. She is a member of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of women and non-binary artists of Vietnamese descent. Terazawa currently teaches poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms at Virginia Tech.
Sophia, welcome to the collective!
We also want to recognize the other manuscripts that, although they did not win, were shortlisted as finalists:
- Ida (Ada, Eva, Sea Monster), by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
- what’s your diagnosis?, by Nandita Dinesh
- The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel, by Molly Gaudry
- Black Hole Burbia, by Dustin Hoffman
- numb and fun and petty theft, by Alexander Shalom Joseph
Sincere thanks to everybody who entered, and to contest judge Kazim Ali.
The reading period for the 2027 FC2 Innovative Fiction Prizes will open on August 15, 2026. Winners receive cash awards and publication. Judges will be announced in May.
The FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize is funded through the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation.
