Omar Musa’s Fierceland has won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, recognising a formally adventurous novel that links family inheritance, colonial violence and environmental destruction across borders.

Omar Musa has won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award for Fierceland, an energetic, formally adventurous novel that confirms his place as one of the most ambitious voices in contemporary Australian literature.

The prize recognises a work that stretches the possibilities of the contemporary Australian novel, while remaining deeply engaged with questions of history, identity and the enduring legacies of empires.

Fierceland combines the sweep of an epic with the formal playfulness of postmodern fiction, tracing intertwined stories of family

The novel follows siblings Roz and Harun as they return to Malaysian Borneo after the death of their father, Yusuf, a wealthy palm-oil magnate whose fortune was built on the back of deforestation and dispossession. Their attempt to reckon with his legacy becomes an inquiry into family history and the long shadows cast by systemic exploitation across generations.

Fierceland refuses narrow geographical and cultural boundaries, presenting Australia as one point within a network of imperial, environmental and cultural........

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