{"id":844343,"date":"2026-08-05T11:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T11:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/844343\/"},"modified":"2026-08-05T11:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T11:34:14","slug":"omar-musa-wins-2026-miles-franklin-literary-award-for-heart-of-darkness-critique-fierceland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/844343\/","title":{"rendered":"Omar Musa wins 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award for Heart of Darkness ‘critique’, Fierceland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Omar Musa has won one of the nation’s top literary prizes, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his novel Fierceland, a family saga interrogating ideas of inheritance, complicity and colonialism.<\/p>\n

The Malaysian Australian author described his win as “mind-blowing”.<\/p>\n

“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,” he tells ABC Arts.<\/p>\n

“It also acknowledges the work of a lot of people behind the scenes.\u202fThere’s always this mythology about the solitary author up in their tower, scribbling away by themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“But for me, fiction is often a collaborative [effort] with mentors and advisors and readers and editors.”<\/p>\n

Fierceland \u2014 the second novel by Musa, who is also a hip hop artist, visual artist and former Australian slam poetry champion \u2014 also won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Fiction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Key facts:The Miles Franklin Award was first awarded in 1957It was established in the will of author Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (author of My Brilliant Career)It distinguishes a novel “of the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases”Past winners include Thea Astley, Peter Carey, Tim Winton and Melissa LucashenkoThe 2025 Miles Franklin was won by Siang Lu for Ghost Stories<\/a><\/p>\n

The book tells the story of two siblings who grow up in Kota Kinabalu on the island of Borneo. The children of a palm oil baron, they must contend with his complicated legacy when, as adults, they travel back to Malaysia for his funeral.<\/p>\n

The Miles Franklin judges described Fierceland as “a tour de force set against the backdrop of the destruction of Borneo’s rainforests”.<\/p>\n

“Cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, this pulsing forest world is the moral centre of Fierceland and Musa’s rhythmic prose hums its defiance,” they said.<\/p>\n

“As it charts a journey of personal and planetary redemption, Fierceland refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.”<\/p>\n

Taking on a maligned industry<\/p>\n

Musa grew up in Queanbeyan, a regional city located a stone’s throw from Canberra.<\/p>\n

His mother, a theatre-maker and arts journalist who grew up in western NSW, met his father when she travelled to Malaysia to direct the first Malay production of Hamlet.<\/p>\n

His father was cast in the lead role.<\/p>\n

Musa travelled to Borneo a handful of times as a child, but it wasn’t until he was an adult that he reconnected with his Malay family.<\/p>\n

“From my early 20s on, I would go at least once a year,” he told ABC Radio National’s The Book Show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“And then a couple of years ago, I moved back to Kota Kinabalu in the state of Sabah, which is the easternmost state of Malaysian Borneo, where my dad comes from.<\/p>\n

“I’ve described it as being a very enriching, confronting, confusing, soul-stirring experience, but one that was necessary for me as a human, but also for this book.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Musa’s latest book is the 2026 short story collection The Vape Lord of Queanbeyan. (ABC News: Jack Fisher)<\/p>\n

Musa’s debut novel, Here Come the Dogs \u2014 longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2015 \u2014 was inspired by his childhood growing up in the suburbs.<\/p>\n

“It was about race relations in Australia, what I see as quite a combustible society in certain ways,” he says.<\/p>\n

“I realised once I’d written that out of my system, I wanted to turn my attention towards the Malaysian Indonesian archipelago, towards my heritage and my history.”<\/p>\n

While he initially set out to write “seafaring epic that was all about the islands and borderlessness”, the story that emerged was very different.<\/p>\n

He was drawn instead to the forests and rivers of Borneo, today a hub of oil-palm cultivation, an industry imported to Southeast Asia from West Africa in the 70s and much maligned for its exploitative and destructive practices.<\/p>\n

While Musa agrees this view is fair, he argues it’s not the complete picture.<\/p>\n

“Oil palm has a really bad name in the West and in some ways, rightly so, because if you’re mowing down primary rainforest and replacing it with a mono-crop, that’s an extremely destructive thing, especially in a world that’s on the edge of ecological collapse,” he says.<\/p>\n

“But for families like mine, the rural poor in a lot of parts of Malaysia were brought out of poverty by some of those palm oil schemes.”<\/p>\n

Miles Franklin shortlist unpacked<\/a><\/p>\n

ABC experts review the shortlist of Australia’s biggest book prize: who made it, who missed out and who they think will win.<\/p>\n

Musa’s father was one of nine siblings, and Musa was the only one of his cousins to grow up in Australia. Many of his family members worked on oil-palm plantations.<\/p>\n

“When I’d go back to Sabah as a kid, I would spend time on the plantations and see what their lives were like,” he says.<\/p>\n

Musa felt his connection to the controversial industry gave him a unique perspective on the issue.<\/p>\n

“Logging and oil palm are very dark, fascinating, complex worlds, but I’d only ever read about them in non-fiction,” he says.<\/p>\n

“I’d never read a novel that explored those worlds, at least in Malaysia and Borneo.”<\/p>\n

A tale of exploitation<\/p>\n

Fierceland centres on a family of four: parents Yusuf and Jenab, and their children Roz and Harun.<\/p>\n

Born into poverty and orphaned when he was seven, Yusuf worked hard for his family, amassing a fortune that granted his children a life of immense privilege.<\/p>\n

At the same time, through his business interests, Yusuf was responsible for the large-scale destruction of rainforest and the dispossession of the people who lived there.<\/p>\n

As they grow up, Roz and Harun struggle to reconcile the two sides of their father, who was both a loving parent and a hard-nosed capitalist.<\/p>\n

“I was trying to tell the story of colonialism and exploitation in Borneo through this family dynamic,” Musa says.<\/p>\n

“I was also thinking about privilege and complicity and how we participate as individuals in systems that are much larger than ourselves, systems of oppression and exploitation, and whether we engage with those systems through choice or coercion.”<\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/p>\n

The character of Roz \u2014 “a rebellious and self-destructive artist” \u2014 first appeared in a short story Musa wrote 10 years ago. (Supplied: Penguin)<\/p>\n

The narrative opens in 1998, when Yusuf takes the children on an ill-fated trip into the forest, where they witness a traumatic incident that becomes a turning point in their lives.<\/p>\n

At first, the journey up the river is magical, Musa says. Yusuf and the children are enchanted by the jungle.<\/p>\n

“[But] once they’re up the river, they suddenly realise that he’s not there to protect the forest. He’s there to cut it down, to make a whole lot of money out of it,” Musa says.<\/p>\n

“This is where a lot of the drama comes from in the book, the interaction between Yusuf Mansur and these people who are standing in his way.”<\/p>\n

Fierceland features multiple voices: not only Rozana and Harun, both as children and adults, but also side characters including their uncle, Pakcik Abdul Hamid, their father’s right-hand man, Jibrail, and his best friend, known affectionately as Crazy Auntie, and, notably, the forest itself.<\/p>\n

July’s best books<\/a><\/p>\n

This month’s best new books include an erotic novel set in a Tasmanian lighthouse, a ‘wonderfully weird debut’ about a woman’s obsession with a cat and a Harlem heist novel.<\/p>\n

The novel takes several other surprising turns, landing in Nigeria in the 70s, 19th-century Venice and the jungle court of the Rajah of Pandasan, where Joseph Conrad (who set several of his novels in Borneo) makes a cameo.<\/p>\n

“In some ways, my book is a subversion and a critique of and a response to [Conrad’s 1899 novella] Heart of Darkness, where the forest \u2026 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,” Musa says.<\/p>\n

“What I wanted to say with this book \u2026 was that the forest and nature is to be respected and it has an agency and a spirit of its own. It’s not just something inert to be acted upon or to be exploited.<\/p>\n

“I wanted the forest to speak for itself. I wanted, obviously, the local characters to speak for themselves, and have names and flesh and blood and flaws, unlike in a book like Heart of Darkness, where they \u2026 are just a blur in the background.”<\/p>\n

Australia’s place in Asia<\/p>\n

With narrative strands unfolding in both Malaysia and Australia, Fierceland situates Australia firmly in the Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n

Roz and Harun’s parents meet at university in Adelaide, where Yusuf is on a Colombo Plan scholarship.<\/p>\n

A generation later, Roz and Harun are sent to elite private schools in Sydney, where Yusuf has extensive business interests.<\/p>\n

Once they finish high school, Harun escapes to LA while Roz remains in Sydney, struggling to establish herself there as an artist.<\/p>\n

On a flight from Sydney to Kuala Lumpur, Roz sits next to a man who surprises her with his knowledge of her home country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She tells him: “Aussies don’t usually give two shits about Malaysia, outside of food.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Musa says The Boat by Nam Le is among his favourite Australian books. “It casts a long shadow, in a good way, over Australian lit.” (ABC News: Jack Fisher)<\/p>\n

Musa sought to address this gap in his novel.<\/p>\n

“It’s sad that Indonesia, Malaysia, PNG are our closest neighbours, but Australians seem to know so little about them,” he says.<\/p>\n

“I’m trying to show those threads of connection and flows between different parts of this region, because we are part of this region.<\/p>\n

“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 \u2014 that it’s \u2026 an isolated outpost that’s fearful of its region, which I think is pretty tragic, to be honest.<\/p>\n

“I don’t want to look back on the 90s as if it was just some golden age, but I do remember there was much more of an effort to present a vision of Australia as more integrated into [the Asia-Pacific].”<\/p>\n

It’s an aspect of the novel that takes on renewed significance amid recent debates around multiculturalism.<\/p>\n

“It shows \u2026 that [debate] in a different light,” Musa says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Omar Musa has won one of the nation’s top literary prizes, the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":844344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134,26230,29331,416351,19687,416349,19688,19689,26229,416350],"class_list":["post-844343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-fierceland","tag-miles-franklin","tag-miles-franklin-2026","tag-miles-franklin-award","tag-miles-franklin-award-2026","tag-miles-franklin-literary-award","tag-miles-franklin-winner","tag-omar-musa","tag-omar-musa-miles-franklin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}