Arabic version: عمر موسى يفوز بجائزة مايلز فرانكلين لعام 2026

According to ABC News, Omar Musa has won the $60,000 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award for Fierceland, his second novel. The Malaysian Australian author, also a hip hop artist, visual artist and former Australian slam poetry champion, called the recognition “mind-blowing” and said fiction was often a collaborative effort involving mentors, advisers, readers and editors.

Fierceland is a family saga about siblings Roz and Harun, children of palm oil baron Yusuf Mansur and Jenab. After growing up in Kota Kinabalu on Borneo, they return to Malaysia for their father’s funeral and confront his complicated legacy. Yusuf rose from poverty to build a fortune, but his business interests also caused rainforest destruction and the dispossession of people living there.

The Miles Franklin judges called the book “a tour de force set against the backdrop of the destruction of Borneo’s rainforests”. They said the forest, cleared for palm oil plantations, was the novel’s moral centre, and that Musa refashioned Malay hikayat storytelling traditions into new Australian idioms. The novel also won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction.

Musa grew up in Queanbeyan and later reconnected with his Malay family, moving to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah a couple of years ago. He said oil palm’s reputation for destructive practices was justified in cases where primary rainforest was replaced with monocrops, while adding that palm oil schemes had brought some rural Malaysian families out of poverty. Musa said Fierceland responds to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by giving the forest agency and allowing local characters to speak for themselves.