Rapper. Poetry slammer. Visual artist. Playwright. Now Malaysian-Australian writer Omar Musa can add another major accomplishment to a multi-storied career: winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Queanbeyan-born Musa has taken home the prestigious $60,000 prize for his second novel, Fierceland, a sweeping family saga that spans the Borneo jungles, Los Angeles and Sydney, drawing deeply on his father’s connections to Malaysia.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say [news of the prize] was amazing, because it’s such a tough slog writing a novel,” Musa said. “You hear people say, ‘Oh yeah, I wrote this novel in six weeks or two months, or whatever.’ I was banging my head against a brick wall for six years writing this one. Twenty-one drafts, so much self-doubt, agony, imposter syndrome as well as the incredibly enriching conversations and breakthroughs. It’s so nice to be recognised for it, because so often you hit those walls writing, and you feel like giving up and whether there is any point to it all.”

Fierceland follows Yusuf, a rags-to-riches palm oil baron, and his two children – Rozana, an eccentric artist, and Harun, a tech developer based in Los Angeles, who return to Sabah for their father’s funeral.

“As the story unfolds the reader realises that he was one of the most corrupt logging and oil palm magnates in South-East Asia and possibly responsible for disappearing people who stood in his way,” Musa says.

Borneo’s rainforests, largely logged over the past 50 years, are given their own voice as a central character in a story influenced by the ancient Malay ghost stories his poet father told him as a child, including that of the Pontianak, the vampiric spirit of a woman who feasts on human blood.

“I had read a lot about palm oil and logging in non-fiction and I thought I would write a story of family drama and complicity,” Musa says.

Miles Franklin judges singled out the novel as a tour de force, noting that “this pulsing forest world is the moral centre of Fierceland, and Musa’s rhythmic prose hums its defiance. As it charts a journey of personal and planetary redemption, Fierceland refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.”

Drawn from a bequest by My Brilliant Career author Miles Franklin, the award recognises a novel of “the highest literary merit” that presents “Australian life in any of its phases.” Fierceland also won the fiction prize at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards earlier this year.

Musa’s debut novel, Here Come the Dogs (2014), which tackled masculinity and race relations in Australian society, was named a Sydney Morning Herald best young Australian novelist selection in 2015 and long-listed for the Miles Franklin and the International Dublin Literary Award.

As a follow-up, Musa was contracted by Penguin to write a seafaring epic. “It didn’t quite work and so in the end all that remained was this little dynamic between a daughter and a father, and I started reshaping and rethinking the novel as I spent more time around Malaysian Borneo, family, the activists, and the punk rockers and artists. I realised I didn’t want to write the seafaring epic; I wanted to write something about the forest and about land,” he says.

In the decade between novels, Musa has released four poetry books and five hip-hop albums – the last dedicated to a dear friend who died suddenly three years ago.

He also wrote the one-man play Since Ali Died for Griffin Theatre Company, which won best cabaret show at the 2018 Sydney Theatre Awards, and hosted solo exhibitions of his woodcut prints, including All My Memories Are Mistranslation.

In 2024, he collaborated with his cellist wife, Mariel Roberts Musa, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra on a one-hour show exploring themes of seafaring, environmental destruction, belonging, borderlessness, and family history.

At one stage, Musa had two books racing each other to publication. Fierceland was first to the finish, while the second is on the way – a much quirkier story about an ex-con who returns to the family home and sets about growing a record-breaking pumpkin for Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.

“It’s a much different novel.”

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