Omar Musa has won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Fierceland, taking home the $60,000 prize. The 42-year-old novelist, poet and rapper learned of his win while on honeymoon in the Philippines, where he was dodging motorcycles before receiving the call.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” he told the Guardian, jetlagged and elated after arriving back in Australia three hours earlier. “I’m floating along. Life does lifey things.”
A novel of family and legacy
Fierceland is Musa’s second novel, a family epic told in lush and extravagant prose. It follows siblings Roz and Harun, who return to Malaysian Borneo after years in Sydney and Los Angeles to reckon with the legacy of their late father, Yusuf, a palm oil baron. Musa described him as a self-made man who “wanted to bend history to his own through sheer tyranny of will”.
Musa’s family hails from Malaysian Borneo, and his win follows that of Malaysian-born author Siang Lu, who took the prize in 2025 for Ghost Cities. “We’re repping pretty hard at the moment,” Musa said.
Judges’ praise and personal journey
The Miles Franklin judges called Fierceland “a tour de force” that “refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.” Musa called the novel “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done”, noting he spent six years writing and rewriting to capture its particular vernacular, blending “the rhythms of rap to Malay ghost storytelling”.
“What readers now read is the 21st draft,” he said. “I was grappling with such complex issues and I wanted to do justice to them – what’s going on in Malaysian Borneo with corruption, complicity, logging, power, and colonial history.”
Research and personal highs and lows
For research, Musa temporarily moved to Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Malaysian Borneo, where he made trips into the jungle to speak with locals and family, some of whom worked on palm oil plantations. Palm oil plantations have devastated rainforests and emit massive carbon emissions, while enriching owners due to palm oil’s use in food, cosmetics and fuels.
“I learned way more than I ever imagined about the ways in which I’m very Australian,” Musa said. “But in other ways I really deepened my connection to Malaysian Borneo, and to my origins. And also understood my privilege.”
Writing Fierceland coincided with great highs and lows. “I got sober and clean. I met my wife and I got married,” Musa said. “But my best friend also died while I was writing and there were points where I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. Writing about grief after that took on a different resonance.”
Filling a gap in fiction
Musa noted that while books about Malaysian Borneo exist, most focus on natural history, ecology or the second world war. “There is very little fiction. And I feel like it’s a land rich with stories. I hadn’t read any books that fictively grappled with palm oil and logging, and I thought it was a really fascinating, dark and complex world to delve into in fiction.”
“I hope I have cracked the door for other people, especially people born in Sabah or Sarawak, to tell their stories in a bold and innovative way. Because I’m really Aussie and I’m aware that I’ll always be an outsider, to a certain extent.”
Looking ahead
While Musa said he didn’t believe “long-form fiction is what I’m best at”, he added that “it’s what I’m proudest of”. He sees fiction as a “radical form of empathy building”, saying, “It’s humanising. And that’s no small thing in a country where oftentimes people are so quick to dehumanise or demonise others.”
As for what’s next, Musa said, “I’m not sure what the future holds. I’m going to just keep putting poetry out. And who knows? I recently took a flamenco class in Spain. Maybe I’ll get good at that.”
