Miles Franklin 2026 Shortlist: Six Novels on Dementia, War, Migration

Shortlist Announced for Australia's Premier Literary Prize

The six novels shortlisted for the 2026 Miles Franklin literary award grapple with profound themes including dementia, war, migration, and loneliness. Australia's most esteemed literary prize, worth $60,000, was announced on Wednesday, featuring four first-time nominees, two of whom are debut novelists.

First-Time Nominees and Debut Novelists

Brisbane-based Steve MinOn is nominated for First Name Second Name, while Tasmania-based Konrad Muller is recognized for My Heart At Evening. Second novels from Omar Musa (Fierceland) and Sean Wilson (You Must Remember This) are also in contention, alongside Randa Abdel-Fattah's Discipline and Josephine Rowe's Little World.

Judges Praise the Shortlist

This year's judging panel stated that the shortlist demonstrates Australian novels can "grapple with the most vexing and profound questions of our time." They described the works as "grand and intimate, these novels sing the Australian experience into new shapes."

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Notable Works and Themes

Abdel-Fattah's Discipline, which won the people's choice award at the 2026 Victorian Premier's literary awards, was called "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 the Adelaide writers festival earlier this year, leading to a boycott by hundreds of writers and the event's cancellation.

MinOn's First Name Second Name follows a dead protagonist encountering 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."

Other Shortlisted Novels

Josephine Rowe's Little World, partially set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, covers themes of desire, loss, loneliness, and faith, and was described as "beautifully compressed." Omar Musa's Fierceland was called "ambitious" for its story of two siblings grappling with inheritance and legacy, described as "a psychologically layered and storied reckoning with the world we have inherited."

Konrad Muller's My Heart At Evening, a mystery set in 1832 Tasmania, is a "complex novel" that "reveals the power of literature to centre the discomfort of this settler colony's past and present." Sean Wilson's You Must Remember This, narrated in first-person by a woman losing her memory, "shows us that dementia is a process still fully situated in the tissue of significance, without romanticising its real losses."

Prize Details and Previous Winner

Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund. Last year's winner was Siang Lu for Ghost Cities. The Miles Franklin literary award winner will be announced on 5 August.