Murder-House Impostor Thriller ‘The Stand-In Family’ Wins Mirror Fiction Award at Taiwan Creative Content Fest

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

The NT$1 million ($32,000) Grand Prize went to Iris Kong for “The Stand-In Family” (provisional title), a suspense novel about four strangers who impersonate a family inside a house where a murder has taken place. Under the surveillance of a property developer, one of them 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 ($22,500) Judges’ Award went to Malaysian writer Liang Xuan for “Endless Rain” (provisional title). Both winning works are eligible for publication and screen adaptation development through Mirror Fiction.

Tung Cheng-yu, CEO of Mirror Fiction, said the award was designed to encourage writers and introduce promising literary properties to potential investors. “I believe that only when you genuinely fall in love with a story can you make the best adaptation,” Tung said. “Adapting a novel for the screen is much easier than starting from scratch because the novel already has an established world,” she said.

Citing audience figures, Tung said films adapted from books drew more than 40% higher attendance than original films, while the difference for television content exceeded 60%. She did not identify the source of the figures during the presentation.

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

In the second half of the showcase, Mirror Fiction sales director Sharleen Liu introduced five literary projects on the company’s 2027 IP slate.

Leading the lineup was “036037,” a contemporary romance novel by Kevin Chen, whose novel “Ghost Town” has been published in English. The story follows two middle-aged people 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, with a four-volume print edition scheduled for December.

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

“Double Diplomacy,” by Daniel Hsieh, follows two brothers, one a diplomat and the other 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 search for her father becomes a journey into identity, belonging and the lives of people left out of official historical accounts.

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,” which won at Taiwan’s Golden Bell Awards, the country’s top TV honors. Its investments include Chung Mong-hong’s “The Falls,” Taiwan’s Oscar submission, and horror film “The Rope Curse 3.”