Australia’s richest state-based literary prize, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, announced its 2026 winners at a ceremony held in Melbourne last night (25 February).
2026 VPLAs – quick links
Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot wins Victorian Prize for Literature
Drawn from the eight category winners, the Victorian Prize for Literature – the program’s most prestigious award, worth $100,000 – was presented to poet Evelyn Araluen for The Rot, with Araluen also taking home the Prize for Indigenous Writing.
Also shortlisted for the Prize for Poetry, The Rot drew praise from judges for the ‘vulnerable, taut and uncompromising’ power of Araluen’s second collection.
The Goorie and Koori poet, editor and educator is a former recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Fellowship, and currently co-edits the literary journal Overland. She was among several Victorian writers celebrated this year, with fellow locals Emilie Collyer, Zeno Sworder and Micaela Sahhar also named winners in their respective categories.
ArtsHub: QLD literary judges resign over KA Ren Wyld Fellowship cancellation
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline wins People’s Choice Award
This celebration of the high calibre of literature produced in Victoria comes at a fraught time, with Writers Victoria currently fighting for its survival, being one of eight successful arts organisations to be abruptly stripped of all funding, prompting questions about whether Melbourne should lose its UNESCO City of Literature status.
However, these awards, administered by The Wheeler Centre on behalf of the Premier of Victoria, do signal a sense of public defiance against the systematic silencing of writers and the devaluation of new and original works of literature more broadly, with the voting public awarding the Wheeler Centre’s 2026 People’s Choice Award to Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Discipline.
The Palestinian-Australian academic and author found herself the centre of a furor when she was disinvited from Adelaide Writers’ Week. It prompted a crisis that saw the festival cancelled and an alternate community book festival, Constellations, organised in the aftermath.
Also nominated as Highly Commended in the Fiction category, Discipline was awarded a cash prize of $2000, funded by The Wheeler Centre.
VPLA winners showcase breadth, ambition and diversity
This year, the Writing for Young Adults category was renamed the John Marsden Prize – a special tribute to the acclaimed writer, teacher and mentor – with Margot McGovern’s gripping horror novel This Stays Between Us winning the category.
Writer Ros Marsden, younger sister of the late John Marsden, was on hand to present the prize, with McGovern acknowledging Marsden’s enduring influence on generations of young readers and writers in her acceptance speech.
Omar Musa’s ‘expansive and tenderly intimate glorious family saga’, Fierceland, took out the Fiction category, while Micaela Sahhar, another Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship recipient, was recognised in Non-Fiction for her remarkable debut memoir, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family.
Eunice Andrada was awarded the Prize for Poetry for her third collection, KONTRA; Emilie Collyer’s hilarious and poignant Super received the Prize for Drama; and Zeno Sworder, whose ‘luminous elegy on memory, loss and regeneration,’ Once I Was a Giant, was selected for the Prize for Children’s Literature.
The winners of the Fiction, Non-Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Indigenous Writing, Children’s Literature and the John Marsden Prize for Writing for Young Adults categories each receive $25,000.
Charlotte Guest’s The Kookaburra, described by the judges as a ‘moving and authentically drawn portrait of grief, care and growing old’, was awarded the Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript. A writer and bookseller from Geelong, Guest follows in the footsteps of best-selling authors like Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project), Jane Harper (The Dry) and Maxine Beneba Clarke (Foreign Soil), who all won the VPLA Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript early in their careers.
Guest’s award carries a $15,000 prize and includes a two-week residency at McCraith House in Dromana, delivered in partnership by The Wheeler Centre and RMIT Culture.
Erin Vincent, CEO of The Wheeler Centre, said the awards celebrated ‘the extraordinary talent of Australian writers and the powerful role stories play in our lives. We’re thrilled to see two of this year’s winners [Araluen and Sahhar] are former fellows of The Wheeler Centre’s landmark Next Chapter writing program, which highlights just how important it is to support writers at every stage of their careers.’
