Fierceland, by Omar Musa, wins 2026 Miles Franklin Award

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Fierceland, by Omar Musa, wins 2026 Miles Franklin Award

7 August 2026

Queanbeyan, NSW, based author and visual artist Omar Musa, has been named winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his 2025 novel Fierceland.

Fierceland is Musa’s second novel, and tells the story of two siblings returning to their home in Malaysian Borneo, for their father’s funeral, having lived overseas for years:

After many years abroad, Roz and Harun return to Malaysian Borneo for the funeral of their father Yusuf — and to reckon with their inheritance. A renowned palm-oil baron during Malaysia’s economic rise, Yusuf built the family’s immense wealth by destroying huge tracts of rainforest. What his children know is that he was also responsible for the violent disappearance of a man who stood in his way.

Harun has become a successful tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, Roz is an artist struggling to stay afloat in Sydney. Now they want to return something their father stole from the forests of their homeland. In their quest for redemption they grapple with the legacy of power and corruption, dreamers and exiles, thugs and zealots. Most dangerous of all, they are haunted — by the ghosts of colonialism, the ghosts of family, the ghosts of language, and the ghosts of the forest itself.

The Miles Franklin is awarded annually to Australian novels of the highest literary merit.

To read more, pick up a book not your phone, no wait…

23 July 2026

Hobart, Tasmania, based Australian software engineer Elia Scotto:

First of all, you don’t have to make time to read. What you need to do is read every single time you are not doing something else. In today’s world, most people pick up their phones as soon as they get a moment of inactivity. Serious readers pick up their books instead.

I’ve been having difficulty finding time to read books recently, for various reasons, and am still working on a way to resolve this.

Since removing most of the social media apps from my phone though, I’m not spending so much time looking at it. That’s eventually going to free up some time to read.

Ironically though, I’ll probably end up reading e-books, on my phone. I know that isn’t the idea, but it’s better than not reading at all. Besides, I don’t like hauling physical media around.

But, if you feel you don’t have enough time to read books, whether print or electronic, try deleting the social media apps from your phone, as a first step.

Reading books has to be more fulfilling than doomscrolling social day-in and day-out.

Are bloggers the same as writers, journalists, under the Australian AI framework?

21 July 2026

Last week the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unveiled his government’s AI strategy. Part of the proposed framework includes a provision to ensure Australian writers, musicians, artists, and journalists, are paid in the event their work is used in the development of AI agents.

This is as it should be. Anyone else who wants to access copyrighted material needs to pay. It should be no different for the big tech, and AI, companies.

As someone who writes predominately online, a blogger, I see myself as either a writer and/or a journalist, in terms of this framework. I know it sound like I’m being pedantic, and surely most people would assume a blogger is regarded as a writer or a journalist.

But is that the way I would actually be viewed under the proposed AI framework? Albanese, after all, made no mention of bloggers, or other online content creators.

Of course, the Prime Minister’s speech was a statement of policy intention, and the finer details, will, I assume, come later as the AI strategy is devised.

The matter is of interest though, as I’m one of who-knows-how-many Australian bloggers whose writings have been harvested in recent years, most likely by AI companies. Would bloggers also be subject to the provisions being proposed for writers, musicians, artists, and journalists?

Or does the exclusively digital nature of a blogger’s work somehow diminish its stature? Will any sort of payment for work copied or used by AI companies only apply to mediums that exist firstly in a physical form, such as books or paintings?

These are mediums that can be digitised (somehow), making them attractive fodder for knowledge hungry AI agents, but does their physical form still give them precedence?

To be clear, I’m not talking about copyright. Any work created in Australia is protected by copyright laws, including that of bloggers. Generally for copyright to apply, a work must be created by a person, be original, and be “fixed”, that is, the work must exist in a tangible form.

This includes content on a web page. Australian bloggers are covered then by copyright. Regardless of whether anyone actually takes notice.

But while Australian copyright laws apply to “people who express original ideas and information in certain forms“, the proposed AI strategy, based on what we know at present, seems far more specific. Writers, musicians, artists, and journalists. Not bloggers, or other content creators working online.

Time will tell though whether Albanese was being specific or not.

As I wrote last week, given the amount of scraping and copying that has already occurred, a large number of Australian creatives will have already lost out, in terms of compensation.

It’s my feeling then any payments that AI companies may be required to make, will only apply to works created after any legislation is enacted. Anything else could be complicated to say the least.

Again though, time will tell.

Kristoffer Tjalve, Elliot Cost, discuss Internet Phone Book, on Wonders of Web Weaving podcast

20 July 2026

A new edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and co-publishers Elliot Cost, and Kristoffer Tjalve (also a Tiny Awards organiser), recently spoke about the esteemed directory on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast.

There are a ton of podcasts out there, but I take time out to tune in to Wonders of Web Weaving, hosted by James’ Coffee Blog, when a new show is posted.

Production is refreshingly straightforward and stripped back. Absent are ads, as is the seeming requisite chessy/generic intro/outro music, and conversation starts without delay. There’s a rawness seasoned podcast listeners may not care for, but to me this is part of the charm.

Sometimes glitches even make it into the final cut. On one occasion, someone’s connection dropped out part way through, which was simply acknowledged instead of being smoothed over in post-production. Re-wilding the web in true IndieWeb/SmallWeb fashion…

Reading was something we used to do before AI came along

13 July 2026

Rose Horowitch, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

I used to read a lot. But that was when for a couple of years I wasn’t doing too much writing here. Once blogging resumed, reading, or finding time to read, became more challenging.

There’s a correlation here. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Nothing to do with AI. One activity increases, the other decreases. There’s only so much time in the day, after all.

It’s a poor excuse not to read though. And then there are book bloggers, who need to read in order to blog meaningfully about what they say they’ve read.

The example of the Harvard (how can that be?) student who was struggling to read A Clockwork Orange is another matter though. I don’t know anything about the individual in question, but I suspect blogging wasn’t holding them back from reading.

Maybe they simply didn’t like the novel, even if it was required reading for their course.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, coming to the big screen

4 June 2026

The news we’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the 2022 novel by American author Gabrielle Zevin, is to be adapted to film.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred in the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, has been cast in the central role of Sadie Green, a games designer.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow sadly remains on my TBR list all these years later. Maybe I’ll get to experience the screen adaptation of the story instead.

As an aside, and I don’t by any means know the ins and outs here, but I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this to happen, given the interest in the novel when it was published.

The abundance of available information is why you read less books

30 May 2026

Arnold King, writing at In My Tribe;

I now read many fewer books than I did ten years ago. This not because of “the phones.” It is not because I have lost my intellectual mojo. It is because alternative sources of information have become more compelling.

Essays, streaming video, podcasts, and (like it or not) social media, are among the alternative sources King refers to, and not even works of fiction are immune.

In short, there’s a lot more information in the world today, compared to even twenty-five years ago, and books are no longer the only way to consume this knowledge.

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The Miles Franklin Literary Award 2026 longlist

25 May 2026

The longlist for the 2026 Miles Franklin award was published on Wednesday 20 May 2026, and includes the following ten titles:

Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts
Fierceland by Omar Musa
First Name Second Name by Steve MinOn
I Want Everything, Dominic Amerena
Little World by Josephine Rowe
My Heart at Evening by Konrad Muller
Salt Upon the Water by Lyn Dickens
Tenderfoot by Toni Jordan
You Must Remember This by Sean Wilson

Presented annually, the Miles Franklin award recognises Australian novels of the highest literary merit. The shortlist will be announced in June, next month, with the winner being named in August.

If you’re looking for reading ideas, literary award longlists make a good starting place, and are for me, a de-facto TBR list. I need more hours in the day to keep up with the resulting reading though.

The Vanishing Wild, a book by Justine E. Hausheer

23 May 2026

The Vanishing Wild, written by Queensland based science writer and photographer Justine E. Hausheer, was published recently. It was the introduction to the book’s subject that caught my eye:

Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, yet native species are in crisis. In the last 200 years, Australia has lost more biodiversity than any other developed nation.

That is not an impressive achievement. What on earth are going here in Australia?

The Serpent in the Grove, winner of the Commonwealth Prize, written with AI help?

23 May 2026

Congratulations to Trinidad and Tobago based writer Jamir Nazir for taking out the Commonwealth Short Story Prize this year, with his work, The Serpent in the Grove.

Since being named winner though, suggestions have emerged that the work is the product of an AI agent. When asked to assess the story, a number of other AI agents (how else would you check?) concluded The Serpent in the Grove was likely written with at least some AI assistance.

Prize organisers say they do not use tools to seek out the use of AI in submissions, considering the short story prize is for unpublished works. I see the logic in this argument, because anything parsed by an AI agent is probably only going to be regurgitated by the same agent later on, somewhere else.

The Commonwealth Prize operates on the principle of trust, say organisers. Here be another minefield of AI making that we need to tip toe our way through.

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