Omar Musa has won the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award for Fierceland, an energetic, formally adventurous novel that confirms his place as one of the most ambitious voices in contemporary Australian literature.
The prize recognises a work that stretches the possibilities of the contemporary Australian novel, while remaining deeply engaged with questions of history, identity and the enduring legacies of empires.
Fierceland combines the sweep of an epic with the formal playfulness of postmodern fiction, tracing intertwined stories of family inheritance, colonial violence and environmental destruction across Malaysian Borneo, Australia and the west coast of the United States. Few novels on this year’s shortlist matched its imaginative range of formal exuberance.
The novel follows siblings Roz and Huran as they return to Malaysian Borneo after the death of their father, Yusuf, a wealthy palm-oil magnate whose fortune was built on the back of deforestation and dispossession. Their attempt to reckon with his legacy becomes an inquiry into family history and the long shadows cast by systemic exploitation across generations.
Fierceland refuses narrow geographical and cultural boundaries, presenting Australia as one point within a network of imperial, environmental and cultural histories. The expansive global scope of the book is established from the outset.
Childhood reverie and ecological catastrophe
It opens in 1998, with 12-year-old Roz describing the Malaysian islands around her. It moves just as readily through recollections of her father’s years in Australia, his love of a particular Nigerian singer and the history of a wooden table imported from London.
Breathless accounts of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro and the Nintendo 64 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time occupy the same imaginative space. They anchor the narrative at the peak of late 20th-century globalisation, when cultures and commodities appeared to move effortlessly across national borders.
The effect is one of almost manic narrative energy, as personal memory collides with global popular culture and the weight of history. Consider the sculpted piece of timber I just mentioned. This is what Yusuf has to say about it:
Borneo ironwood. The strongest, rarest tree. This table once belonged to William Cowie, who oversaw the Borneo railway. I had it imported from the UK. Cowie made the decisions about our future from a posh dining room in London. Now it’s a Sabahan who makes the decisions.
The table encapsulates one of the novel’s central concerns. It bears the imprint of an earlier history of extraction and accumulation, embodied in Cowie’s role overseeing the Borneo Railway. But Yusuf’s pride in possessing it exposes a deeper irony. Yusuf imagines he has displaced that order, but his wealth rests on equivalent practices of exploitation and environmental degradation.
Roz and Harun’s childhood is one of extraordinary comfort. Raised in a luxury apartment overlooking the bay at Kota Kinabalu, protected by the father’s riches and status, they inhabit a world of security and possibility. Beyond that sheltered existence, however, Sabah’s rainforests are steadily and systematically being destroyed, paving the way for the development of Yusuf’s palm-oil kingdom.
In this manner, the novel juxtaposes childhood reverie with ecological catastrophe, asking what it means to inherit a world already being dismantled.
Thinking on an epic scale
That willingness to think on an epic scale is matched by Musa’s formal inventiveness. Best known as a poet, rapper and visual artist, he brings all three sensibilities to the page. Fierceland moves freely between prose and poetry, shifts between multiple narrative voices and plays with the possibilities of typography. The result is a novel with a restless, at times improvising, energy.
Not every innovation succeeds. In his review for The Conversation, Giacomo Bianchino questioned the sections narrated from the perspective of the forest. He argued “Musa doesn’t push the idea of the forest’s speech beyond vaguely ornamental lyricism” and that he “struggles to balance the urgency of the book’s pace with the meditative idylls of its more poetic moments”.
There is something to this criticism. Yet, these uneven moments are themselves inseparable from the novel’s larger achievement.
Fierceland eschews caution. It looks to test the limits of what the contemporary Australian novel can do – even if that means some experiments prove more compelling than others. At a moment when literary fiction can often seem wary of formal risk, Musa’s willingness to push beyond established conventions feels worthy of recognition in itself.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
