Dementia, war, migration and loneliness are among the themes of the six novels selected for this year’s Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most esteemed literary prize, worth $60,000.
Shortlist Announced
Announced on Wednesday, the 2026 shortlist includes four first-time nominees, two of whom are debut novelists: Brisbane-based Steve MinOn for First Name Second Name and Tasmania-based Konrad Muller for My Heart At Evening. Second novels from Omar Musa (Fierceland) and Sean Wilson (You Must Remember This) are also in contention, as are Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline and Josephine Rowe’s Little World.
Judges’ Comments
This year’s judging panel said the shortlist showed that Australian novels can “grapple with the most vexing and profound questions of our time”. “Grand and intimate, these novels sing the Australian experience into new shapes,” the judges said.
Notable Books and Authors
Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline, which won the people’s choice award at the 2026 Victorian Premier’s literary awards, was described as “both a taut political thriller and a humane meditation on the way that Australia must continue to find ways of working through agonising conflicts”. The Palestinian Australian author was disinvited from Adelaide writers festival earlier this year, leading to the event being boycotted by hundreds of writers and subsequently cancelled. In April, Abdel-Fattah cut ties with publisher University of Queensland Press, joining at least 16 other authors who ended their contracts or vowed not to work with the publisher again after it cancelled its publication of Jazz Money’s Bila, A River Cycle over comments by the book’s illustrator.
MinOn’s First Name Second Name follows a dead protagonist as he encounters four generations of family estrangements to recover his lost identity. Judges called it “complex and timely” for its questions about “who gets to be a settler and who remains a migrant in Australia”.
Judges said Josephine Rowe’s “slender novel” Little World, partially set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and covering themes of desire, loss, loneliness and faith, was “beautifully compressed”.
Omar Musa’s Fierceland was called “ambitious” for its story of two siblings grappling with the burden of inheritance and legacy. “Fierceland is a psychologically layered and storied reckoning with the world we have inherited,” they said.
My Heart At Evening, Konrad Muller’s mystery set in 1832 Tasmania, is a “complex novel”, remarked the judges, which “reveals the power of literature to centre the discomfort of this settler colony’s past and present”.
Sean Wilson’s You Must Remember This, which is narrated in first-person by a woman who is steadily losing her memory, “shows us that dementia is a process still fully situated in the tissue of significance,” said the judges, “without romanticising its real losses.”
Prize Details
Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Last year’s winner was Siang Lu for his sprawling, ambitious novel Ghost Cities. The Miles Franklin literary award will be announced on 5 August.
The 2026 Miles Franklin Shortlist
- Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah (University of Queensland Press)
- First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn (University of Queensland Press)
- My Heart At Evening by Konrad Muller (Evercreech Editions)
- Fierceland by Omar Musa (Penguin Random House Australia)
- Little World by Josephine Rowe (Black Inc)
- You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson (Affirm Press)
