In short
- Araluen’s work, The Rot, was described as “formally daring, emotionally demanding and politically uncompromising.”
- Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah won the $2,000 People’s Choice Award for her novel Discipline.
Australia’s richest literary prize has gone to Evelyn Araluen, with her latest collection described by the jury as a work of remarkable poetic intelligence.
Goorie/Koori poet Araluen won the $100,000 Victorian Literature Prize for The Rot at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in Melbourne on Wednesday evening.
Araluen also won the $25,000 prize for Indigenous writing.
“The Rot is a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally daring, emotionally demanding and politically uncompromising. Araluen pushes contemporary indigenous writings into new territory, combining lyricism, criticism and cultural memory with precision and risk,” the jury members said in their report.
“Her poems move with disturbing clarity through intergenerational pain, structural violence and the daily effort to survive, refusing sentimentality while remaining fiercely compassionate. Combining tradition with innovation, she writes with a voice that is elastic, self-questioning and alive to the deployment of language.”
The $25,000 fiction prize went to Omar Musa from Borneo and Brooklyn for his family saga Fierceland.
Micaela Sahhar won the nonfiction category with her debut memoir, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family.
Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah won the $2,000 People’s Choice Award for her novel Discipline, with the book also highly praised in the fiction category.
While voting for the popular award was underway in January, Abdel-Fattah was removed from the line-up for Adelaide Writers’ Week, leading to a mass boycott that culminated in the event’s cancellation.
She will appear at a replacement event in Adelaide, as well as the Newcastle and Sydney writers’ festivals later in 2026.
The prize for writing for young adults, renamed the John Marsden Prize in honor of the late writer and teacher, went to Margot McGovern’s horror novel This Stays Between Us.
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