Evelyn Araluen has won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for her poetry collection The Rot, along with the $25,000 Prize for Indigenous Writing. The awards, announced on February 25, 2026, in Melbourne, recognize excellence across various literary categories. Araluen's win follows her 2022 Stella Prize for debut collection Dropbear.
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Australia’s richest state-based literary prize, announced its 2026 winners at a ceremony in Melbourne on February 25. Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn Araluen received the top $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for her second collection, The Rot, published by University of Queensland Press. She also won the $25,000 Prize for Indigenous Writing and was shortlisted for the Poetry category.
Judges described The Rot as “a work of remarkable poetic intelligence; formally bold, emotionally exacting and politically uncompromising” and “a vital intervention in this country’s cultural conversation.” Araluen, co-editor of Overland literary journal, explained the collection's inspiration from her 2024 Adelaide Writers’ Week experience, where she was heckled for reading a poem referencing Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. “These poems were about witnessing a genocide and the feeling of inertia and grief and rage and passivity that sits in the body when you feel so powerless against our government’s complicity in that genocide,” she said.
Araluen plans to donate part of her prize money to Sisters Inside, an Aboriginal-led organization supporting incarcerated women, and to Gaza relief efforts. She noted the work addresses themes of girlhood, gender, global imperial capitalism, and structural violence, written amid personal grief following the deaths of three Elders.
Other category winners include Omar Musa for Fiction with Fierceland (Penguin Random House Australia), Micaela Sahhar for Non-Fiction with Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family (NewSouth), Eunice Andrada for Poetry with KONTRA (Giramondo), Emilie Collyer for Drama with Super (Currency Press & Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre), Zeno Sworder for Children’s Literature with Once I Was a Giant (Thames & Hudson Australia), Margot McGovern for the John Marsden Prize for Writing for Young Adults with This Stays Between Us (Penguin Random House Australia), and Charlotte Guest for Unpublished Manuscript with The Kookaburra. Randa Abdel-Fattah won the $2,000 People’s Choice Award for Discipline (University of Queensland Press).
The awards, running since 1985, selected winners from nearly 700 entries. Each category winner receives $25,000, except Unpublished Manuscript ($15,000 plus residency) and People’s Choice ($2,000).