Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2026 winners announced

The Wheeler Centre has announced the winners of the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Goorie and Koori poet and academic Evelyn Araluen has won the overall Victorian Prize for Literature, worth $100,000, for The Rot (UQP), along with the prize for Indigenous Writing.

The judges described this poetry collection as “a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising. Araluen pushes contemporary Indigenous writing into new territory, blending lyric, critique and cultural memory with precision and risk.

“Her poems move with unsettling clarity through intergenerational pain, structural violence and the daily labour of survival, refusing sentimentality while remaining fiercely compassionate. Engaging tradition with innovation, she writes in a voice that is elastic, self-questioning and alive to the stakes of language. Formally inventive and ethically rigorous, The Rot stands as a vital intervention in this country’s cultural conversation.”

The winners in each category are:

Victorian Prize for Literature ($100,000)

• The Rot (Evelyn Araluen, UQP)

Fiction ($25,000)

• Fierceland (Omar Musa, Penguin)

Non-Fiction ($25,000)

• Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family (Micaela Sahhar, NewSouth)

Indigenous Writing ($25,000)

• The Rot (Evelyn Araluen, UQP)

Drama ($25,000)

• Super (Emilie Collyer, Currency Press & Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre)

Poetry ($25,000)

• KONTRA (Eunice Andrada, Giramondo)

John Marsden Prize for Writing for Young Adults ($25,000)

• This Stays Between Us (Margot McGovern, Penguin)

Children’s Literature ($25,000)

• Once I Was a Giant (Zeno Sworder, T&H)

Unpublished Manuscript ($25,000)

• “The Kookaburra” (Charlotte Guest)

People’s Choice Award ($25,000)

• Discipline (Randa Abdel-Fattah, UQP).

The winners were chosen from shortlists released in December. More information about the awards and judges’ comments are available on the Wheeler Centre website.

The Wheeler Centre has provided a livestream of the event on Youtube.

Category: Awards Local news