Shortlist Announced for Australia's Premier Literary Prize
The 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlist has been revealed, featuring six novels that grapple with profound contemporary issues. The winner will receive $60,000, Australia's most esteemed literary prize.
Among the shortlisted works are four first-time nominees, including debut novelists Steve MinOn from Brisbane and Konrad Muller from Tasmania. Second novels from Omar Musa and Sean Wilson also compete, alongside works by Randa Abdel-Fattah and Josephine Rowe.
Diverse Themes and First-Time Nominees
The judging panel praised the shortlist for addressing "the most vexing and profound questions of our time," describing the novels as "grand and intimate" works that "sing the Australian experience into new shapes."
Randa Abdel-Fattah's Discipline, which won the people's choice award at the 2026 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, is called "both a taut political thriller and a humane meditation on the way that Australia must continue to find ways of working through agonising conflicts." Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian Australian author, was disinvited from the Adelaide Writers' Festival earlier this year, leading to a boycott by hundreds of writers and the event's cancellation.
Notable Debuts and Returning Authors
Steve MinOn's First Name Second Name follows a dead protagonist encountering four generations of family estrangements. Judges called it "complex and timely" for questioning "who gets to be a settler and who remains a migrant in Australia."
Josephine Rowe's Little World, partially set in the Kimberley region, covers themes of desire, loss, loneliness, and faith, described as "beautifully compressed." Omar Musa's Fierceland is an "ambitious" story of two siblings grappling with inheritance and legacy, a "psychologically layered and storied reckoning with the world we have inherited."
Historical and Emotional Depth
Konrad Muller's My Heart At Evening, a mystery set in 1832 Tasmania, is a "complex novel" that "reveals the power of literature to centre the discomfort of this settler colony's past and present." Sean Wilson's You Must Remember This, narrated by a woman losing her memory, "shows us that dementia is a process still fully situated in the tissue of significance, without romanticising its real losses."
Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund. Last year's winner was Siang Lu for Ghost Cities. The Miles Franklin winner will be announced on 5 August.
Complete Shortlist
- Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah (University of Queensland Press)
- First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn (University of Queensland Press)
- My Heart At Evening by Konrad Muller (Evercreech Editions)
- Fierceland by Omar Musa (Penguin Random House Australia)
- Little World by Josephine Rowe (Black Inc)
- You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson (Affirm Press)
