Ender Başkan has won the 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with his debut collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers. The announcement was made on 10 September at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Başkan, a Melbourne-based poet, novelist, small-press publisher and bookseller, will receive a tax-free $80,000 in prize money.

The book, which explores the complexities of new parenthood and family life, previously won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Mary Gilmore Award and the ALS Gold Medal.

Judges’ comments

Ender Başkan’s Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a timely and exquisitely crafted exploration of the arcs of love, joy and communion that guide us through our everyday lives, despite the precarities of the modern world. 

These poems reveal a curiosity about the complexities of our many and varied human relationships: with family, friends, neighbours, communities, colleagues, new acquaintances and strangers. Yet at the centre of this brilliant debut is love and care for two very young children who appear and reappear throughout the poems, fortifying a collection that chatters and hums with the wonder of new language. 

These are big-hearted poems that pull us close to the ‘I’ to witness the motions, mundanities and marvels of daily living, from navigating domestic responsibilities to enduring the repetitiveness of paid work, negotiating difficult neighbours to visiting his grandparents’ homeland with his young children. 

Cognisant of the creeping ruins of a world stultified by corporate greed and injustice, Başkan’s lines nevertheless gambol across observation, documentation and reflection with an expansive tongue, as if to set in motion a truly activist poetics, one that builds towards another possible, big-hearted world. 

As he writes, ‘how do we imagine other worlds if we only speak commodity?’ Indeed, taking cues from his children’s curious tongues, Başkan’s poems stretch through play with word, line and language, as if attempting to build a lexicon derived from origins of intimacy rather than ownership. 

This book is an invitation to play and to listen, to explore what might be possible if a line were to stretch between one person and another. In a world where there is much to be angry about, Two Hundred Million Musketeers greets despair with the full force of wonder and reciprocity. It is a book whose ‘bigness makes other people feel bigger’.

‘This is my book but it’s our book, and this book of ours contains multitudes,’ Başkan said in his acceptance speech. Among the many he thanked were his children: seven-year-old Dilân, whose ‘entry into language was the engine to this book’ and his youngest Ezgi, ‘who says, “My dad makes poems, that’s what he really does, poems, he makes poems!’ To which most people say “okay…”,’ Başkan chuckled. ‘So I’m going to carry this medallion around.’  

Read a reflection by Başkan on his multi-award-winning work here.

Eunice Andrada and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle have been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry in the 2026 Queensland Literary Awards. Andrada is a finalist for her third collection KONTRA, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was longlisted for the Stella Prize. Butcher-McGunnigle is recognised for her book of prose poems Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama. The announcement was made on 29 July.

Read the judges’ comments below.

KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

A book of exceptional formal ambition and imaginative force, KONTRA enlarges the possibilities of the contemporary lyric. Through its deft interplay of lyric, persona and documentary fragments, the collection moves between the personal and the historical, the mythical and the contemporary, blurring the boundaries between them while sustaining a rare urgency throughout. These are poems of haunting and transformation, alive to the violence and love we carry with us. Andrada’s formal inventiveness arises naturally from the emotional and intellectual pressures of her work. Conceptually sophisticated and emotionally immediate, KONTRA is a work of astonishing clarity and enduring resonance.

Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

The voice at the core of this collection of prose poems is unique and striking. This is a book that warrants rereading: its phrases appear and reappear in ever more inventive ways as the poet adopts intricate and unpredictable patterns that are variously bleak, witty, playful and eerie. The collection endlessly recombines and repurposes language, finding in collage and repetition a form of transformation. The past inevitably returns across these poems, transformed always by the poet’s charismatic voice.

Audition by Pip Adam has been shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2026. Part science fiction, part social realism, the book tells the story of three giants hurtling through space. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Published by Giramondo in 2023, and released last year in the United States by Coffee House Press, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given. 

Write the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize judges, ‘As its three rom-com quoting central characters travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment, Audition explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.’

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. This award is intended to recognise those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.

The winner of the 2026 prize will be announced on 21 October 2026. The 2024 winner was It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (Giramondo, 2024), which also won The Novel Prize.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan has won the Anne Elder Award 2025, an annual prize given to best first book of poetry published in Australia.

‘The winner and commended works stood out namely for their ambition, scope and inventiveness, commented the judges. ‘They break and bend rules, subvert and reimagine poetic expectations, experiment in syntax, lineation, narrative stakes and form, each one governed by a wholly singular poetic voice. These collections not only contribute to our national poetry but extend our poetic imagination in new and unexpected ways. They are nothing short of a triumph.’

Read the judges’ comments below.

Two Hundred Million Musketeers is an illustrious, spirited debut that beholds shifting inner worlds and geographies, polyphonic voices, and everyday lifeworlds. Drawing from the language of children, waged labour, history, Marxism, and travels from Melbourne to Türkiye, Başkan’s approach to poetry is playful, lively and experimental. Narratives and lifeworlds spill out with immense velocity. Poetic interrogations of speech and sound speak to traditions of migrant poets writing in English, like Ania Walwicz and Pi O. Başkan’s lines explode like fireworks – the collection holds the absurd rhythms, spontaneous expressions and joyous exclamations of the lived world. Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a radiant debut, outstanding in originality, experimentation and resonance.

The book was also shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Award and the ALS Gold Medal.

Read an excerpt here.

Cannon by the acclaimed Australian cartoonist Lee Lai has been named the winner of the 2026 Stella Prize. The announcement was made on 13 May at a ceremony in Brisbane with the author in attendance. The win marks the first time that a graphic novel has received the top honour in the award’s history; Lai’s debut book, Stone Fruit, was shortlisted in 2022.

Worth $60,000, the Stella Prize is awarded annually to ‘the most excellent, original and outstanding book written by an Australian woman or non-binary writer’. 

Cannon was published in hardcover last year by Giramondo in Australia, and by Drawn & Quarterly in Canada, where the Melbourne-born author is based. It will also be published in French, German, Italian and Spanish. The book was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is currently in the running for a Doug Wright Award and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction – the North American equivalent to the Stella, celebrating ‘creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.’

See the Stella judges’ report for Cannon below.

Reliable and dutiful Cannon (real name: Lucy; nickname Luce; ironically – or perhaps not – Luce Cannon) has myriad responsibilities. During the day, she helps her avoidant mother by taking care of her elderly gung-gung (maternal grandfather). At night, she works in the pressure-cooker kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. In her off-hours, she’s a confidante and troubleshooter for best friend Trish. However, Cannon is about to crack – something we see in a dizzying flashforward in the first pages. Cannon is a compelling depiction of a fracturing friendship between two queer, second-generation Chinese women. It is also a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the “responsible one”, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.) Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.

‘This year’s winner is a delight that goes right to the heart,’ Stella Prize Chair of Judges Sophie Gee further commented. ‘This year’s judges couldn’t resist the winning book’s combination of seriousness and playfulness. We loved how the writer tells the stories of many women’s lives, captured in a page-turning narrative that’s beautifully disciplined, emotionally rich and by turns disarmingly funny and alarmingly true to life.’

‘[Cannon] is a story about small-scale human follies, and the excruciating process of learning and growing through them,’ said Lee in her acceptance speech. ‘It’s also a book about love and about rage, and those are two emotions that have fuelled my efforts as an artist and as an organiser for the past many years. If I must think about the fact that this book is landing for somebody else, then my big hope is that it acts as a catharsis and an encouragement to experience some real love, or some real anger, and that one might use that for something worthwhile.’ 

Lai will commence a brief tour of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Public events include a conversation with Prize Judge Benjamin Law tonight, an event at RMIT in Melbourne on Monday, and a Queerstories and prize-winners panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival next week. She toured the east coast of Australia earlier this year following previous book tours across Canada, the United States and Italy. View photos from the Sydney launch of Cannon on our Facebook, and hear a recording of the event here.

Giramondo has had a number of titles recognised by The Stella Prize since it began in 2013. Alexis Wright is distinguished as the only author to have won the prize twice, in 2018 for Tracker and in 2024 for Praiseworthy. Our other finalists include Sanya Rushdi for Hospital, Anwen Crawford for No Document, Yumna Kassab for The House of Youssef, Fiona Wright for The World Was Whole and the late Beverley Farmer for This Water: Five Tales. Several poetry titles have also been listed since the genre was included for consideration, including TAKE CARE and KONTRA by Eunice Andrada, and Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali.

Publicity enquires relating to the Stella Prize can be directed to stacey@daydreamnation.co.

Cannon by Lee Lai has been shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize. It is the second time a graphic novel has been shortlisted for the prize; the first was for Lai’s debut work, Stone Fruit, in 2022. This year’s announcement was made in Sydney on 8 April, a few weeks after the Canadian-based author wrapped up her east coast tour of Australia.

Named a ‘best new book’ by ABC Arts, The Guardian, the New York Times, NPR and the Sydney Morning Herald, Cannon has also in Australia been shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Overseas, the book was or is currently a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards, the GLAAD Media Awards, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. This last prize is a North American equivalent to the Stella, in that it celebrates ‘creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in Canada and the United States.’

See the Stella judges’ report for Cannon below.

Reliable and dutiful Cannon (real name: Lucy; nickname Luce; ironically – or perhaps not – Luce Cannon) has myriad responsibilities. During the day, she helps her avoidant mother by taking care of her elderly gung-gung (maternal grandfather). At night, she works in the pressure-cooker kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. In her off-hours, she’s a confidante and troubleshooter for best friend Trish. However, Cannon is about to crack – something we see in a dizzying flashforward in the first pages. Cannon is a compelling depiction of a fracturing friendship between two queer, second-generation Chinese women. It is also a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the “responsible one”, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.) Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.

Two Giramondo authors have been longlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize: Eunice Andrada for her poetry collection KONTRA and Lee Lai for her graphic novel Cannon. The announcement was made at a ceremony on 11 March, which was coincidentally the night of Lee’s Melbourne book launch. Meanwhile, Eunice’s book had a few weeks’ prior won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry.

Read the Stella judges’ remarks on both works below.

KONTRA by Eunice Andrada

KONTRA is remarkable because it appears confessional and personal while in fact playing with a poetic speaking persona. That figure is the kontrabida, a provocateur, villainess figure from Filipino television dramas. Through the figure of the bida Andrada grapples with the complexities of Filipina feminine identities. The collection challenging readers assumptions about how contemporary poetry works, inviting us to remain at a distance from the writing, while at the same time allowing us to become intimate with many of its voices. The collection as a whole emphasizes setting, character, scene and action in ways we associate with prose narrative, and it does so through innovative, surprising poetic technique, form and voice. We find humor and playfulness, quiet but insistent. Andrada’s scenes are sometimes like teledrama sets – groups of women in a room, with life swirling around them, letting her play with the melodramatic figure of the bida without giving into melodrama. Her canny title also resonates in the poet’s sense of being out of step both with her Filipina heritage and her Australian identity. She’s always exploring the idea of selfhood made from contrary motions, migrations and creative forms.

Cannon by Lee Lai

Reliable and dutiful Cannon (real name: Lucy; nickname Luce; ironically – or perhaps not – Luce Cannon) has myriad responsibilities. During the day, she helps her avoidant mother by taking care of her elderly gung-gung (maternal grandfather). At night, she works in the pressure-cooker kitchen of a fine dining restaurant. In her off-hours, she’s a confidante and troubleshooter for best friend Trish. However, Cannon is about to crack – something we see in a dizzying flashforward in the first pages. Cannon is a compelling depiction of a fracturing friendship between two queer, second-generation Chinese women. It is also a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the “responsible one”, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.) Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.

Eunice Andrada won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The ceremony was livestreamed by The Wheeler Centre. Watch Eunice’s acceptance speech and read the transcript below.

Thank you so much to the judges for recognising my craft with this award. Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida – a woman branded the ‘antagonist’; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story. I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness, in her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making. But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to work with and within language as a Filipina writer.  

Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to instead platform others who have been writing about our lives and our bodies for far too long. I come from a lineage of women who could not write their story themselves because they were too busy raising children on their own as the matriarchs of their families. I am deeply grateful for the love and creativity and imagination with which they raised me. Because it takes so much creativity and imagination to figure out how to survive while raising a big family while having little material means.

I want to thank my mother Dinna, my grandmother, my legion of aunts, and my three sisters – to whom I dedicated this book – thank you. I also want to thank my publisher, Giramondo, and the entire team, for all the care and the work you’ve put into my books. Thank you to the poets in this category, I’m so honoured to be beside you. To the poet Gloria Demillo, who is with me tonight and has been with me since we were both 16, writing poems for poetry slams – thank you.  And finally, thank you to the community of poets who have raised me up for many years, especially to my mentor, Merlinda Bobis, who guided me in the creation of KONTRA. I owe this award to all of you.

Eunice Andrada has won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry with her third collection, KONTRA. The announcement was made at a ceremony on Thursday 25 February at The Wheeler Centre.

‘Many of the poems in KONTRA are written from the voice of the kontrabida, a woman branded as the antagonist; someone who always dies by the end of someone else’s story,’ says Andrada in her acceptance speech. ‘I wrote the poems of KONTRA to imagine a Filipino woman who doesn’t die; someone who is free to live in her queerness and her everyday acts of resistance. Someone who can move towards a future of her own making.’

‘But at its heart, KONTRA is a reflection on what it means to write with and within language as a Filipino writer. Our stories are often made invisible, or worse, pushed to the side to platform others who have written about our lives and our bodies for far too long.’

Read the judges’ report:

KONTRA is an exquisite work of precision. Here awakens an astonishing poetics of dissidence, decadence and eroticism. The kontrabida, a Filipino soap opera villain, is invoked in the many afterlives of violence. By inhabiting the persona of opposition, the poet exhumes another self from the ruins of rape and empire in shifting temporalities. From Renaissance paintings to polyphonic choral voices, Andrada binds lucid and ethereal images together in vivid scenes, imaginatively pulling infinite futures from fracture. Each line is visually palpable and thematically resonant, cutting fertile ground for mutual possibilities of desire and resistance. At once tender and defiant, KONTRA is a testament to lyrical mastery. 

Eunice Andrada’s first collection Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021) gained several honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Stella Prize, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. 

Also shortlisted for this year’s VPLA for Poetry was Two Hundred Million Musketeers by Ender Başkan. Watch a livestream of the awards ceremony below.

Hasib Hourani’s debut collection rock flight has won the 2025 Mary Gilmore Award, a prize given for the best first book of poetry published in the previous calendar year. The announcement was made on 30 July, a little over a month after the book won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards.

Read the judges’ comments below.

‘rock flight is an extended poetic negotiation with certainty: the certainty of colonial violence, of dispossession, of the forces that degrade home and homeland, and of the suffering to self and family and collective identity that comes of these modern conditions. rock flight also performs the certainty of witnessing, of testimony, of the bonds of family and memory… It is a profound honour to nominate this book as the winner of the Mary Gilmore Award.’

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Wangal Country in Sydney. Learn about upcoming events featuring Hourani here.

Hasib Hourani’s debut rock flight and Kate Middleton’s collection Television have been shortlisted in the NSW Literary Awards for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, with rock flight also a finalist for the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. The announcement was made on 29 April 2025 by the State Library of NSW. Read the judges’ comments below.

rock flight by Hasib Hourani

rock flight is a conceptually inventive collection that weaves together the political and deeply personal to create a powerful voice speaking against the moral, military and bureaucratic violences of colonialism. Unconventional forms combine with free verse to create a multilayered call to action, mobilising disparate fields of relationship, reference and understanding to form a cohesive whole that compels attention and empathy. 

Hasib Hourani’s work is grounded in the history and personal experience of Palestinian dispossession, detailing connection to land and people. The writing locates the human and immediate in events that have been distorted, ignored or manipulated by government and media. The poems are rich with symbolic suggestion, crafted to speak against cruelty and legal incoherence. rock flight is a rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone.

Television by Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton’s latest collection, Television, moves into new territory with a sustained meditation on mass culture. Part autobiography, part essay, all poetry, Television explores the personal and wider social effects of television culture with wit, insight, intelligence and a startling poetic discipline. Written in tight but conversational couplets, these poems reflect on how the self is at once mediated, dissociated and aggrandised by the media it encounters. They examine the porousness of the boundaries between ‘real life’ and imaginative worlds, and the parasocial connection between creators and fictional characters and their fans that is a defining aspect of contemporary culture. 

Middleton brings into profound focus experiences that are often thought of as ephemeral and trivial, paying particular attention to the creation of a feminine self, from the young girl whose experience is routinely dismissed or demonised, to the older woman reflecting on those internalised lessons; how ‘the panopticon lives in their guts’.

The winners of the awards will be announced on Monday 19 May 2025.