By Len Power

Queanbeyan author Omar Musa has won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction for his novel Fierceland.

The $25,000 prize was announced in Melbourne, with judges describing Fierceland as “in turns expansive and tenderly intimate” and “a searing excoriation of colonialism and inheritance”.

The novel follows a sweeping, globe-spanning narrative that weaves past and present into a family saga on a mythical scale.

Musa, a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist and poet from Queanbeyan, has released four poetry books, five hip-hop records and several novels. He has also held a number of solo exhibitions, including The Hurt Business, currently showing at Megalo Print Studio in Canberra.

The overall winner of this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards was indigenous writer Evelyn Araluen, who took out the $100,000 prize as well as the $25,000 Prize for Indigenous Writing for her poetry collection Rot. Judges called the work “a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising”.

The $2000 People’s Choice Award went to Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah for her novel Discipline. Abdel-Fattah had earlier been cancelled from the Adelaide Writers Festival this year.

Other 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Prize) for Super; Zeno Sworder (Children’s Literature Prize) for Once I Was a Giant; and Charlotte Guest (Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript) for The Kookaburra.