When Omar Musa found out he had won Australia’s most prestigious prize for fiction, the $60,000 Miles Franklin literary award, he was already on a high. The 42-year-old was on his honeymoon, carefully dodging motorcycles in the Philippines when he got the call.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” he told the Guardian, jetlagged and elated after arriving back in Australia three hours earlier. “I’m floating along. Life does lifey things.”
Musa, a novelist, poet and rapper who grew up in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, has won for his second novel Fierceland, a family epic told in lush and extravagant prose. It follows two siblings, Roz and Harun, who, after years living in Sydney and Los Angeles, return home to Malaysian Borneo to contend with the legacy of their late father. Yusuf was a palm oil baron, a self-made man who, in Musa’s words, “wanted to bend history to his own through sheer tyranny of will”.
Musa’s family comes from Malaysian Borneo. His win follows that of Malaysian-born author Siang Lu, who won the Miles Franklin in 2025 for his novel Ghost Cities: “We’re repping pretty hard at the moment,” Musa said.
The Miles Franklin judges praised Fierceland “a tour de force” that “refashions the venerable, vernacular hikayat traditions of Malay storytelling into new Australian idioms.” Musa sees the novel as “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done”, having spent six years writing and rewriting to get its particular vernacular, blending everything from “the rhythms of rap to Malay ghost storytelling”.
“What readers now read is the 21st draft,” he said. “I was grappling with such complex issues and I wanted to do justice to them – what’s going on in Malaysian Borneo with corruption, complicity, logging, power, and colonial history.”
Palm oil plantations in Malaysian Borneo have devastated rainforests and release massive carbon emissions, while also making owners incredibly wealthy due to palm oil use in food, cosmetics and fuels. Musa’s research for Fierceland involved a temporary move to the capital, Kota Kinabalu, where he made trips into the jungle to talk to locals and his family, some of whom worked on palm oil plantations, as he polished his novel.
“I learned way more than I ever imagined about the ways in which I’m very Australian,” Musa said. “But in other ways I really deepened my connection to Malaysian Borneo, and to my origins. And also understood my privilege.” This became stark in surprising ways, like a discussion with a cousin about watching The Simpsons after school as a kid: “I asked if they did that too. And he was like: ‘Well, on the estate there is no electricity from 8 in the morning till 8 at night, so I couldn’t watch cartoons.’”
Fierceland coincided with great highs but also great lows. “I got sober and clean. I met my wife and I got married,” Musa said. “But my best friend also died while I was writing and there were points where I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. Writing about grief after that took on a different resonance.”
Musa found that while there are books about Malaysian Borneo, most are related to its natural history, ecology or role in the second world war. “There is very little fiction. And I feel like it’s a land rich with stories. I hadn’t read any books that fictively grappled with palm oil and logging, and I thought it was a really fascinating, dark and complex world to delve into in fiction.”
“I hope I have cracked the door for other people, especially people born in Sabah or Sarawak, to tell their stories in a bold and innovative way. Because I’m really Aussie and I’m aware that I’ll always be an outsider, to a certain extent.”
While Musa said that he didn’t believe “long-form fiction is what I’m best at”, he added that “it’s what I’m proudest of”.
“I feel like we’re living in a world and a country where there’s often a dearth of empathy and compassion, but fiction is a really radical form of empathy building,” Musa said. “It’s humanising. And that’s no small thing in a country where oftentimes people are so quick to dehumanise or demonise others.”
What is next from Musa? “I’m not sure what the future holds. I’m going to just keep putting poetry out,” he said. “And who knows? I recently took a flamenco class in Spain. Maybe I’ll get good at that.”
