Omar Musa, winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Award, joins us to discuss Fierce Land, a ghost story that travels from Kuala Lumpur and the Bornean rainforest to Sydney, Los Angeles, and nineteenth-century Venice. Following siblings Roz and Harun on a childhood trip into the jungle with their father, the novel asks how we mourn someone we loved who also did terrible things. Musa opens with a thunderous reading in the voice of the forest itself, then talks about Max Porter’s mentoring, Malaysia’s turbulent 1998 to 2018, what Conrad got wrong about jungles, and Australia’s “willful amnesia.” He explores hauntology, the Pontianak myth, and the poem he translated into sixteen indigenous Bornean languages, set against the sound of sap moving in a thousand-year-old tree. Plus: free will versus fate, grief, and a healthy fear of the forest.
Buy Fierceland: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/fierceland
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Omar Musa is a Bornean-Australian author, visual artist, rapper and poet. He has written two novels (including Fierceland), three books of poetry, five hip-hop records, and two plays, Since Ali Died and The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio), with cellist Mariel Roberts Musa. Fierceland won the Miles Franklin Literary Award (Australia’s most prestigious literary award) and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. He has had several solo exhibitions of his woodcuts, including his most recent, The Hurt Business. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Best Australian Stories and Best of Australian Poems.
Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.
Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w
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