Randa Abdel-Fattah among authors on Miles Franklin list
The Palestinian-Australian author who sparked intense controversy over Adelaide Writer’s Week has been longlisted in one of the nation’s most prestigious literary awards.
The longlist for Australia’s most prestigious book prize includes a novel by a Palestinian-Australian author who’s been embroiled in free speech controversies.
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s book Discipline, published by the University of Queensland Press, is one of 10 books up for the $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, with the longlist released on Wednesday.
In January, the author was controversially disinvited to one of Australia’s biggest literary events, Adelaide Writers’ Week, sparking a mass boycott by speakers that led to the cancellation for Writers’ Week for 2026.
The book itself covers debates about personal responsibility and free speech, as it follows two Palestinian-Australians navigating academia and the mainstream media.
Abdel-Fattah was also among a number of authors to publicly ditch the University of Queensland Press in April over the publisher’s decision not to publish Indigenous children’s book Bila: A River Cycle.
UQP decided to pulp the book after its illustrator made comments about the Bondi massacre that were believed to have breached the university’s definition of anti-Semitism.
The Miles Franklin is awarded for novels of the highest literary merit that portray Australian life, and the 2026 longlist includes stories stretching from remote Western Australia to far north Queensland and Tasmania, organisers said.
The novels remind readers of the vastness of the continent and the global networks in which the notion of Australian life is invariably embedded, they said.
Several new writers have made the longlist cut, including a debut novel by Dominic Amerena titled I Want Everything, which has already won several book prizes.
It’s the tale of an ambitious young writer who constructs a series of lies to uncover what happened to a cult author who disappeared.
Even stranger, Steve MinOn’s debut First Name Second Name, also published by the University of Queensland Press, is about a reanimated corpse that makes a pilgrimage to his birthplace in far north Queensland.
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“The journey will be long and difficult … You’ll know you’ve arrived when you get there,” it reads – as much a message for reanimated corpses, as for authors contending for literary prizes.
The full 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award Longlist
Randa Abel-Fattah – Discipline
Dominic Amerena – I Want Everything
Lyn Dickens – Salt Upon the Water
Toni Jordan – Tenderfoot
Steve MinOn – First Name Second Name
Konrad Muller – My Heart at Evening
Omar Musa – Fierceland
Josephine Rowe – Little World
Madeleine Watts – Elegy, Southwest
Sean Wilson – You Must Remember This
–AAP
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