Omar Musa wins VPLA for Fiction for Fierceland

Congratulations to Omar Musa who has won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction for his novel Fierceland.

The Judges said: “In part following two siblings as they reckon with the death of the family patriarch, Fierceland is in turns expansive and tenderly intimate. A glorious family saga, it stood out to the judges for its glittering prose and sweeping, ambitious form. Foregrounded in a love for Borneo and Sabahan languages, it is a work both of revival and of dispossession. Journeying through grief, emigration, and environmental catastrophe, Omar Musa approaches human history through ‘fractals’, viewing each of us as an occupant in a legacy of ‘patterns … infinitely repeated at smaller scales.’ Following the ramifications of each such pattern, the novel interrogates how to move forward when forgiveness means forgetting, and whether you can — or should — still love someone alongside the spectres of their past. A searing excoriation of colonialism and inheritance, Fierceland spans decades and continents to exhume its ghosts.”