Ender Başkan wins Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Two Hundred Million Musketeers
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.
