UQP authors shortlisted for The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
Congratulations to the UQP authors shortlisted in the 2026 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards...
JM Field, The Eagle and the Crow
Evelyn Araluen, The Rot
Rachel Morton, The Sun Was Electric Light
Angie Cui and Evie Barrow, My Mum is a Bird
Randa Abdel-Fattah, Discipline
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (VPLAs) were inaugurated by the Victorian Government in 1985 to honour literary achievement by Australian writers. Administered by The Wheeler Centre on behalf of the Premier of Victoria, the VPLAs are one of Australia’s most prestigious and lucrative literary prize suites – championing excellence across Fiction, Non-Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Indigenous Writing, Humour Writing, Children’s Literature and Writing for Young Adults.
For this year’s Awards the Writing for Young Adults category has been renamed The John Marsden Prize for Writing for Young Adults as a special tribute to the beloved author.
The winners of each Prize receive $25,000, and will go on to contest the major prize, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature. This is the single most valuable literary award in the country.
The winners will be announced February 2026.
Please see the UQP titles and authors shortlisted below.
Prize for Indigenous Writing
Prize for Non-fiction
The Eagle and the Crowby JM Field
Judges Report:
In this generous and beautiful book, JM Field writes about language – about the violence that colonialism and colonisers do to it, and the ways that it can be claimed, reclaimed, generated and regenerated. This is a work of resistance, sovereignty, and survivance, speaking of and to First Nations pasts, presents, and futures. Demonstrating the genius of Gamilaraay knowledge and philosophies, Field offers a work that is stunning in its ability to teach all of us about kinship, mathematics and the vastness and rigour of the possibilities of human interrelationships. The Eagle & the Crow rewards careful reading and rereading. We are lucky to be gifted this work to sit with and learn from.
Prize for Poetry
Prize for Indigenous Writing
The Rot by Evelyn Araluen
Judges Report:
From the rot in the cogs of late-stage capitalism to bed rot to
mould growing on rented bedrooms and forgotten emails, The Rot reckons
with girlhood in a fractured, decaying world. Wielding together elegy, theory
and bathtub poems, Araluen burns the structures that facilitate precarity,
complicity and injustice in the present day. Form itself is in a state of
decomposition as the poems fray, disperse and decay throughout the collection.
Araluen’s poetics are vulnerable, taut and uncompromising, comparable to the
likes of Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Kapil, proving she is undoubtedly one of the
most important voices in poetry today. The Rot is the spirit of our
times and a call to action.
Prize for Fiction
The Sun Was Electric Light by Rachel Morton
Judges Report:
The Sun Was Electric Light is a book that happens to you: its quiet,
transformative power like an incantation or a prayer. How do we find connection
and a meaningful life? And how can we know if we’re on the right path when we
remain a mystery, even to ourselves? When Ruth returns to Panajachel, a lake
town in Guatemala where she remembers once being happy a decade ago, she is
alone. Her days are a series of small, pleasant but somehow distant tasks: a
swim in the lake, coffee and tortillas, a drink at the bar.
She meets two very
different women: the sturdy and reliable Emilie, and Carmen, who is a
dangerous, charming rush. She finds and loses work, makes art, moves house,
ponders what it means to belong. To read this book is to consider the Rilke
quote, “The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.” A work of
clear-eyed asceticism that asks more questions than it answers, the judges were
struck by its existential grace. In spare, pure prose, Morton has invented a
work that makes its home inside us.
Congratulations again to JM, Evelyn, Rachel, Angie, Evie and Randa.
