Omar Musa wins Miles Franklin Literary Award for FIERCELAND

Omar Musa just won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the most prestigious literary award in Australia, for his novel Fierceland. His acceptance speech is posted in full below.

Fierceland is available to purchase in Australia/NZ (including e-book and audiobook): https://www.penguin.com.au/books/fierceland-9781926428796

South-East Asia: https://www.penguin.sg/book/fierceland/

United Kingdom: https://footnotepress.com/?s=fierceland

Omar Musa Miles Franklin acceptance speech:

I want to pay my respects to the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, where we stand, and the Ngunnawal and Ngambri People of where I grew up in Queanbeyan – to Country that has long been a land of song and story, resilience, courage and ingenuity. Thank you so much to the judges – I am blown away and so, so grateful for this honour.

I didn’t create this book alone – this award honours the many mentors, teachers, editors, fellows and advisors I’ve had along the way. I’d like to thank my mother Helen, a true believer in the power of the arts, for her lifelong love, encouragement and constructive criticism. I’d like to thank the ever-inspiring boss lady that is my wife Mariel, my father Musa Bin Masran and family in Malaysian Borneo, in particular my cousin Abdul Razzaq Bin Bakri. I’d like to thank my beautiful, beautiful friends; my editors Jojo Jakob and Jo Dingley, my agent Tara Wynne; my publisher Nikki Christer and the team at Penguin Random House Australia; I’d like to thank Sophie Cunningham and Ben Ball, who first believed in my fiction; I’d like to thank Nam Le, Ennis Cehic, Max Porter and Joan Faydrie Lojingki. I dedicated this book to my grandparents - my Nenek and Atok – who bequeathed me the  ancient gift of storytelling, poetry and semangat – spirit – and my best friend B, who died while I was writing this, but whose presence and encouragement was always with me.

It’s been a long journey to even be able to publish a book like this. My first two books were self-published. And this book itself went through 21 drafts over many years. Fierceland is the summation of many failures and mistakes, bad stories, shitty poems, journeys upriver and listening to the forest; countless conversations with Aunties, Uncles and Elders; this is the summation of love and grief – for languages, lives and land; of witnessing a genocide in Gaza and rampant Islamophobia; of collabs and translations, imposter syndrome, mistakes, a large dollop of privilege, addiction, bipolar, recovery, and many more mistakes. 

Thank you to the other writers for your work – in this room and outside of it. In this fragmented world aflame, where there is often a dearth of empathy, and a surplus of hate, fiction can a radical form of empathy-building; an alchemical force; a means of countermapping against the restrictive, shank-sharp lines of ethnonationalism, censorship and jingoism, against the type of dehumanising language that justifies genocide or that seeks to replace the diversity of a rain forest with a monocrop (or a monoculture). May we continue to create and promote an Australian literature that is bold and big-brained, risk-taking, imaginative and outward-looking. That is a mirror, and a window. Thank you so much.