In brief
- Araluen's work, The Rot, was described as "formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising."
- Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah won the $2000 People's Choice Award for her novel Discipline.
Australia's richest state literary prize has gone to Evelyn Araluen, with her latest collection described by judges as a work of remarkable poetic intelligence.
Goorie/Koori poet Araluen won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for The Rot at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards on Wednesday night in Melbourne.
Araluen also won the $25,000 Prize for Indigenous writing.
"The Rot is a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising. Araluen pushes contemporary Indigenous writing into new territory, blending lyric, critique and cultural memory with precision and risk," the judges said in their report.
"Her poems move with unsettling clarity through intergenerational pain, structural violence and the daily labour of survival, refusing sentimentality while remaining fiercely compassionate. Engaging tradition with innovation, she writes in a voice that is elastic, self-questioning and alive to the stakes of language."
The $25,000 fiction prize went to Borneo and Brooklyn-based Omar Musa for his family saga Fierceland.
Micaela Sahhar won the non-fiction 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 $2000 popular-vote People's Choice Award for her novel Discipline, with the book also highly commended 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, sparking a mass boycott that culminated in the event's cancellation.
She is slated to appear at a replacement event in Adelaide, as well as the Newcastle and Sydney writers' festivals later in 2026.
The award for young adult writing, renamed the John Marsden Prize in honour of the late writer and teacher, went to Margot McGovern's horror novel This Stays Between Us.
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