The 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist

We are thrilled to share that the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlist has been announced. Congratulations to Randa, Steve and the other longlisted authors!

Bringing together stories shaped by varied cultural backgrounds, voices and experiences, this selection celebrates the richness and complexity of Australian storytelling today.

According to the judges, “This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist showcases the capacity of the Australian novel to grapple with the most vexing and profound questions of our time. Grand and intimate, these novels sing the Australian experience into new shapes.”

The Award celebrates novels of the highest literary merit that tell stories about Australian life. The winner will receive $60,000.

Shortlisted UQP titles for the prize include:

• Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah
• First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn

Each shortlisted author receives $5,000 from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

This year’s judges are Richard Neville, Mitchell Librarian of the State Library of NSW, as chair, and literary scholars Jumana Bayeh, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth and Maggie Nolan.

Judges Comment, Discipline:
"Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel Discipline personalises the political faultlines that have opened up in Australia in the wake of the October 7 attacks in Israel in 2023 and the war in Palestine. Though set in 2021, Discipline addresses the complexity of these ongoing events. In the novel, the institutions that underpin our democratic fabric, such as schools and universities and a free media, all find themselves caught in dilemmas that test their principles to the limit. Discipline is both a taut political thriller and a humane meditation on the way that Australia must continue to find ways of working through agonising conflicts that may seem far away but in which Australia and Australians are intimately entangled."

Judges Comment, First Name Second Name:
Steve MinOn’s debut novel, First Name Second Name, opens with the death of Stephen Bolin, and then follows his corpse—the mythical Chinese Jiāngshī—home
from Brisbane to Innisfail. In so doing, it evokes a changing geographic panorama and emotional landscape which frames the multi-generational and multi-racial family history it narrates. The novel asks complex and timely questions about who gets to be a settler and who remains a migrant in Australia. First Name Second Name explores how these larger national questions intersect with the forces of desire and belonging that shape us. This queer and deeply human novel offers a new perspective on what it means to be Australian.

The 2026 winner, to be announced in Sydney on 5 August 2026, will receive $60,000.

The 2025 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner was Siang Lu for his novel Ghost Cities (University of Queensland Press).

There is more information about the award available here.