Omar Musa Wins Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction

Omar Musa has been awarded the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction for his novel Fierceland.

The $25,000 prize was announced in Melbourne, with judges praising the book as “in turns expansive and tenderly intimate” and “a searing excoriation of colonialism and inheritance”. The novel weaves a sweeping, globe-spanning narrative that moves between past and present, building a family saga on a mythic scale.

A Bornean-Australian writer, poet and visual artist from Queanbeyan, Musa is known for his multidisciplinary practice, spanning literature, music and visual art. He has published four poetry collections, released five hip-hop albums and written several novels, alongside exhibiting his visual work internationally. His current exhibition, The Hurt Business, is on view at Megalo Print Studio in Canberra.

The overall winner of the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards was Evelyn Araluen, who received the $100,000 prize in addition to the $25,000 Prize for Indigenous Writing for her poetry collection Rot. Judges described the work as “a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising”.

The $2,000 People’s Choice Award was awarded to Randa Abdel-Fattah for her novel Discipline.

Other category winners included Eunice Andrada (Poetry Prize) for KONTRA; Micaela Sahhar (Non-Fiction Prize) for Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family; Margot McGovern (John Marsden Prize for Writing for Young Adults) for This Stays Between Us; Emilie Collyer (Drama Prize) for Super; Zeno Sworder (Children’s Literature Prize) for Once I Was a Giant; and Charlotte Guest (Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript) for The Kookaburra.