Queanbeyan’s own Omar Musa performing at the Q. Photo: Q.
This year’s Miles Franklin Award for literature has gone to Queanbeyan writer Omar Musa for his novel Fierceland, a story of family and environmental destruction set in Borneo’s palm oil forests.
The announcement was made at the State Library of NSW on Wednesday night (5 August).
The judging panel, led by State Library chair Richard Neville, said the novel was ” a tour de force set against the backdrop of the destruction of Borneo’s rainforests. This pulsing forest world is the moral centre of Fierceland and Musa’s rhythmic prose hums its defiance”.
“As it charts a journey of personal and planetary redemption, Fierceland refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat tradition of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.”
Speaking to the ABC, Musa described the $60,000 Miles Franklin win as “mind-blowing”, adding that “you can never predict or expect something like this, but I’m really stoked to have my work recognised and acknowledged alongside such amazing peers”.
The Miles Franklin Award was first awarded in 1957, a bequest by the author of My Brilliant Career. It recognises an Australian novel “of the highest literary merit”. Past winners include Patrick White for Voss, George Johnston for My Brother Jack, Peter Carey for Bliss and Tim Winton for Cloudstreet.
Musa, who grew up in Queanbeyan and made his name initially as a slam poet and rapper, received widespread acclaim for his first novel Here Come the Dogs, which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2015.
He has also published five hip-hop records and four books of poetry including The Clocks (2009), Parang (2009), Millefiori (2012), and Killernova (2018).
His earliest work celebrated both the grit and beauty of Queanbeyan, where he spent his childhood, writing about “jittery Queanbeyan winter days, where trees are anorexic, the sky sky blue and the tips of grass frosted blonde”, a place possible to both love and hate.
Omar Musa, Fixed Fight, 2026, woodcut on paper, 40 x 50cm, edition 10, printer: Narit Tananon Photo: Megalo.
Crime, domestic violence, warmth and diversity all feature in his work, reflecting a childhood where there were sometimes drug deals in the streets but also a rich tapestry of migrant life and working-class culture.
Omar’s subject matter has often drawn on his family heritage – his mother, Helen, is a well-known and widely respected Canberra arts critic who grew up in Forbes, Western NSW, while his father is from Borneo. They met when he was cast as the lead in the first Malay production of Hamlet.
In recent years Musa has connected more deeply with his Malaysian heritage and family in the state of Sabah, where he lived for several years. His words and linocuts illustrate the complexity of family stories, entwined with environmental destruction wrought by the palm oil industry on Borneo’s rainforests.
Logging and palm oil harvesting are highly destructive, but Musa points out they also lifted many Malaysians – including his own family – out of dire poverty, and the book plumbs these contradictions.
Fierceland centres on a family of four, made wealthy by palm oil but grappling with that legacy in the next generation. Among many characters, the forest also speaks, and Musa has described the book as an echo and subversion of Joseph Conrad’s great novel, Heart of Darkness.
Where Conrad’s Europeans saw the forest as a threatening, dark force pitted against their commercial interests, Musa gives the forest and the land a voice for their suffering.
Politics, pain and the stories of ordinary people have been an enduring thread through all his art forms – a March exhibition at Megalo Gallery called The Hurt Business explored the violence and competing forces in our news cycles and social media feeds, from Gaza to Venezuela, death squads in the Philippines, ICE raids on families and children in the US.
“There’s always this mythology about the solitary author up in their tower, scribbling away by themselves”, Musa says.
“But for me, fiction is often a collaborative with mentors and advisors and readers and editors”.
