Debut Novel Set in Segregated Cairns Shantytown Wins Top Queensland Literary Award

The Meriam and Wagedagam author's novel was inspired by her ancestors' lives in Cairns-Malay Town, an unmapped shantytown that housed Indigenous Australians, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Malaysian and Sri Lankan residents who had been segregated from the white population, and existed from the late 1800s until the late 1950s.

The awards judges praised the book in a joint statement as "accessible and deeply enjoyable" and singled out its "vivid sense of place". They wrote that "warm, richly drawn characters and an innovative integration of Ailan languages come together in a rich, cohesive whole, bringing new insight and fresh imaginative life to a far north Queensland community", describing The Pearl of Tagai Town as a "stunning debut novel".

Claire Thomas took the A$15,000 fiction prize for On Not Climbing Mountains, which follows a woman on a trip in Switzerland who distracts herself from grief with research on famous names connected to the country. The A$15,000 nonfiction award went to Australian-Palestinian writer Micaela Sahhar for Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family, about how her family's story was shaped by the Nakba, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during Israel's founding in 1948. Sahhar won the same category at the Victorian premier's literary awards in February.

Zeno Sworder won the A$15,000 children's book category with Once I Was a Giant, which has also taken book of the year at the Australian Book Industry awards and the children's category at the Victorian premier's literary award. Illustrated and written by Sworder, it tells the story of a tree transformed into a pencil that then writes its own story. Julianne Negri won the A$15,000 young adult category for The Belly of a Wolf, Helena Pantsis won the A$15,000 short story category for her collection Mother Salad, and Eunice Andrada won the A$17,500 poetry category for Kontra.

Sita Walker's debut In a Common Hour won the A$15,000 people's choice award. The novel takes place across a single hour at a state high school, and Walker has taught for more than 20 years, currently teaching English at a high school in Brisbane's south-east.

The Queensland Literary Awards were founded in 1999 and were known as the Queensland premier's literary awards until 2012, when they were abolished by the then premier Campbell Newman; the state's literary community intervened to keep them running. They were administered by the State Library of Queensland from 2014 until 2025, when they became embroiled in controversy over the arts minister John-Paul Langbroek's intervention to stop the library awarding a A$15,000 fellowship to First Nations author K A Ren Wyld over a social media post about the dead Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Wyld said she had posted the comment in an "emotional moment" and that her winning manuscript had nothing to do with Gaza. Twelve QLA judges resigned in protest at her treatment, which delayed the previous year's awards. Langbroek eventually handed management of the prizes to the Brisbane writers festival from this year.