Malaysian Australian author Omar Musa has won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, one of Australia's top literary prizes, for his novel Fierceland. The $60,000 award recognizes the family saga that interrogates ideas of inheritance, complicity, and colonialism.

Musa described his win as "mind-blowing" and expressed gratitude for having his work acknowledged alongside esteemed peers. He told ABC Arts, "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."

Fierceland is Musa's second novel and also won the 2026 Victorian Premier's Prize for Fiction. The story follows two siblings growing up in Kota Kinabalu on the island of Borneo. The novel is set against the backdrop of the destruction of Borneo's rainforests, cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, which Musa describes as "the moral centre of Fierceland."

Musa, who is also a hip hop artist, visual artist, and former Australian slam poetry champion, said the book serves as a subversion and critique of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. He explained, "In some ways, my book is a subversion and a critique of and a response to [Conrad's novella] Heart of Darkness, where the forest … becomes a kind of a metaphor for the hearts of man, and also is just a bit of an impressionistic backdrop for the lives of the European characters."

He also commented on perceptions of Australia, stating, "Unfortunately, over the last, let's say, 20, 25 years, there's a segment of the Australian population that has reverted to what I would say is more of an archaic view of Australia — that it's … an isolated outpost that's fearful of its region, which I think is pretty tragic, to be honest."

Fierceland charts a journey of personal and planetary redemption, refashioning the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.

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