Prizes · Australia

Lenora Thaker wins Premier's Award at 2026 Queensland Literary Awards

The Pearl of Tagai Town took the Award for a Work of State Significance, and Claire Thomas's On Not Climbing Mountains won fiction.

By The Book Source8 October 20261 minute read

Lenora Thaker's The Pearl of Tagai Town (Text Publishing) has won the Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance at the 2026 Queensland Literary Awards, according to the winners list published by Brisbane Writers Festival.

Claire Thomas won the fiction award for On Not Climbing Mountains (Hachette Australia), which the judges described as highly literary and cerebral. The non-fiction award went to Micaela Sahhar's Find Me at the Jaffa Gate (NewSouth Publishing).

Julianne Negri won the young adult award for The Belly of a Wolf (UWA Publishing), and Zeno Sworder won the children's award for Once I Was a Giant (Thames and Hudson Australia). Eunice Andrada's KONTRA (Giramondo Publishing) took the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a poetry collection, and Helena Pantsis won the biennial Steele Rudd Award for a short story collection with Mother Salad (UWA Publishing). Sita Walker's In a Common Hour (Ultimo Press) was named the Lord Mayor's People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year.

Among the awards for emerging and unpublished writers, Lukas Williams won the David Unaipon Award for When the Circle Speaks, and Helen Crampton won the manuscript award for an emerging Queensland writer with The Passion Hunters. Svetlana Sterlin received the Premier's Young Publisher and Writer Award and Abi Stephenson the Regional Publisher and Writer Award. Charlotte Barkla, Gavin Yuan Gao and Melanie Myers were awarded Queensland Writers Fellowships.

Original source: Brisbane Writers Festival (Queensland Literary Awards) ↗

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