Australian award winners to look out for

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are due to be announced this week, with winners to take home $80,000 each. In the meantime, these are the titles that have been garnering acclaim from awards judges in recent months.

Omar Musa won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for his novel Fierceland (Penguin). The book also won the Fiction prize at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Musa is a Bornean Australian author, visual artist and poet. In her review for Books+Publishing, Marina Sano wrote of Fierceland: “The writing is often intentionally claustrophobic, mimicking the humid mugginess of the tropics while conveying a yearning homesickness for a home that may no longer exist. This striking novel is a bold addition to the literary landscape, using the specificity of its Sabahan setting and characters to explore universally resonant themes, particularly through its entanglement with the longstanding networks of global colonialism.”

Angie Faye Martin’s Melaleuca (HQ Fiction) won the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and was shortlisted for the People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award, for Best Debut Crime Fiction at the Ned Kelly Awards and in the Davitt Awards 2026. HarperCollins introduces the book with: “A country town, a brutal murder, a shameful past, a reckoning to come … The injustices of the past and dangers of the present envelop Aboriginal policewoman Renee Taylor, when her unwilling return to the small outback town of her childhood plunges her into the investigation of a brutal murder.”

Kate Wild’s The Red House (Allen & Unwin) won the nonfiction award at the Age Book of the Year Awards, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Queensland Literary Awards, Davitt Awards and Ned Kelly Awards, and was longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. The Red House is Wild’s account of the fatal shooting of a Warlpiri-Luritja man by a white police officer in 2019. The Age Book of the Year nonfiction judges said: “The Red House … gives us no sermons, only a compulsively readable story.”

Natalie Harkin’s Apron-Sorrow/Sovereign-Tea (Wakefield Press) won the Indigenous Writers’ Prize at the NSW Literary Awards, was shortlisted for the NSW History Awards, the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the South Australian Literary Awards, and was longlisted for the Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award. The Indigenous Writers’ Prize judges said: “Apron-Sorrow/Sovereign-Tea explores how First Nations women were used as indentured domestic servants in South Australia across the 20th century. Drawing upon archival material and the lived experiences of women who survived the system, and their relatives, it is a confronting depiction of a racist and paternalistic system that separated these women from their families and exploited their labour.”

Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot (University of Queensland Press) won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the ABIA Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year award, was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award and the South Australian Literary Awards, and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. The Victorian Prize for Literature judges described the 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.”

Micaela Sahhar’s Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family (NewSouth) won the nonfiction prize at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing prize at the NSW Literary Awards, and the Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work at the National Biography Awards. The book was also shortlisted in the Queensland Literary Awards and South Australian Literary Awards. Books+Publishing reviewer Hellai Gul wrote: “Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is more than a lyrical memoir that binds personal storytelling with global history; Sahhar has built an archive for future generations. Readers interested in tales of migration and ancestral history will find a treasure trove in Sahhar’s emotive and detailed offering.”

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline (University of Queensland Press) won the People’s Choice Award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the South Australian Literary Awards. University of Queensland Press (UQP) has sold world English (ex ANZ) rights to Discipline to Oneworld Publications, in a deal between UQP rights manager Erin Sandiford and Oneworld publisher Juliet Mabey. Abdel-Fattah said: “Discipline is a story about the costs of fighting for a just and equal world and the price paid by the diasporas of empire. It’s about liberal institutions – universities and mainstream media – and the price we all pay when those with privilege choose to remain silent. Whilst Discipline is set in Australia, it is very much a transnational diasporic story that resonates across the borders of Western societies.” UQP has also sold Arabic language rights to Al Karma and audiobook rights to Wavesound.

S Shakthidharan’s Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath (Powerhouse Publishing) won the Multicultural NSW Award at the NSW Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and National Biography Award. Le Bruit du Monde acquired the French language rights to the memoir, and Le Bruit du Monde CEO Marie-Pierre Gracedieu said: “I could not resist this writer’s invitation to discover his family story: a unique retelling of Sri Lankan immigration to Australia in the 1980s through an individual’s quest to better understand his most intimate relationships. It makes it so riveting and universal.”

Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel (Macmillan) won the ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year award, and the audiobook of Mad Mabel, narrated by Hannah Fredericksen & Jenny Seedsman (Macmillan Australia Audio), won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year award. Mad Mabel was also shortlisted in the Ned Kelly Awards and Davitt Awards. ABIA judges were impressed with how Pan Macmillan Australia “elevated Hepworth’s distinctive brand with innovative marketing and bold retail partnerships”. “These factors translated into outstanding sales results, with the title outperforming the broader fiction market.”

Once I Was a Giant (Zeno Sworder, Thames & Hudson Australia) won the overall Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year award, as well as the award for Children’s Picture Book of the Year. The book also won the Children’s Literature prize at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and Picture Book of the Year (0–18 years) at the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards. The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards judges said: “Once I Was a Giant is a luminous elegy on memory, loss and regeneration, voiced by a tree who ‘once touched the sun’. Zeno Sworder’s writing and art unfold with poetry and elegance. The text breathes alongside glowing illustrations to form an ecological meditation that is intimate and planetary. At the heart of the text is a friendship between wanderer and tree, presented as an exquisite study in care, belonging, and grief. Its quiet movement toward renewal resists sentimentality and offers hope without simplification. A profoundly moving picture book that invites us to sit with loss and gently imagine futures rooted in tenderness and return.”

A Piece of Red Cloth (Leonie Norrington, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga & Djawundil Maymuru, Allen & Unwin) won the ABIA Social Impact Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted in the NT Book Awards and Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. ABIA judges said: “A Piece of Red Cloth is a powerful example of collaboration and cultural integrity in publishing and demonstrates the impact of truth-telling through literature. … Representing a groundbreaking approach to publishing First Nations stories, judges acknowledged the cultural significance of this book, recognising its cultural significance and national reach.”

Helen Ennis won the National Biography Award for Max Dupain: A Portrait (4th Estate). The State Library of NSW said that the biography explores “the complexities and contradictions of the man who produced Australia’s most well-known image, the Sunbaker, and examines the sources of his creativity.”

Grandmother from the East, Grandmother from the West (Jacinta Liu, illustrated by Freda Chiu, Lothian Children’s Books) won the Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Oceania division of this year’s Crystal Kite Member Choice Awards, presented by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

Run (Sarah Armstrong, Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing) was an honour book in the Book of the Year: Younger readers (7–12 years) category at the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards, and was shortlisted in the Davitt Awards.

Category: Think Australian awards