Fierceland by Omar Musa has won the A$60,000 (about US$42,300) 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, which recognizes a novel of "the highest literary merit" that presents "Australian life in any of its phases." Perpetual is trustee for the award.
Judges called Fierceland "a tour de force set against the backdrop of the destruction of Borneo's rainforests. Cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, this pulsing forest world is the moral centre of Fierceland and Musa's rhythmic prose hums its defiance. In the human drama, siblings Harun and Rozana gradually realise that even in Sydney and Los Angeles, they cannot outrun the fraught legacy of their father, a palm-oil baron in Sabah. As it charts a journey of personal and planetary redemption, Fierceland refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms."