Lenora Thaker has taken the Queensland premier's award for a work of state significance, worth $30,000, at the Queensland literary awards. The prize went to her historical debut novel, The Pearl of Tagai Town.

A debut novel born of Cairns-Malay Town

Thaker, an author of Meriam and Wagedagam heritage, drew the book from her ancestors' lives in an unmapped shantytown known as Cairns-Malay Town. The settlement, segregated from the white population, housed Indigenous Australian, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Malaysian and Sri Lankan residents from the late 1800s until the late 1950s.

The judges, writing in a joint statement, praised an accessible and deeply enjoyable book with a vivid sense of place.

They also pointed to the novel's warm, richly drawn characters and its innovative integration of Ailan languages.

Where the winners were named

The winners were announced at a ceremony on Thursday night at Brisbane Powerhouse, held as part of the Brisbane writers festival.

The other category winners

Seven further prizes were decided on the night, most carrying $15,000:

• •Fiction ($15,000): Claire Thomas for On Not Climbing Mountains, about a woman in Switzerland distracting herself from grief by researching famous names connected to the country.
• •Nonfiction ($15,000): Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian Family by Australian-Palestinian writer Micaela Sahhar, whose family story is shaped by the Nakba, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled during Israel's founding in 1948. Sahhar won the same category at the Victorian premier's literary awards in February.
• •Children's book ($15,000): Once I Was a Giant, written and illustrated by Zeno Sworder, about a tree transformed into a pencil that then writes its own story. It has also won book of the year at the Australian Book Industry awards and the children's category at the Victorian premier's literary award.
• •Young adult ($15,000): Julianne Negri for The Belly of a Wolf.
• •Short story ($15,000): Helena Pantsis for her collection Mother Salad.
• •Poetry ($17,500): Eunice Andrada for her collection Kontra.
• •People's choice ($15,000): Sita Walker's debut novel In a Common Hour, which takes place across a single hour at a state high school. Walker has taught for more than 20 years and currently teaches English at a high school in Brisbane's south-east.

An awards scheme with a turbulent recent history

The Queensland literary awards were founded in 1999 and ran as the Queensland premier's literary awards until 2012, when then premier Campbell Newman abolished them. Queensland's literary community intervened to keep the awards alive.

The State Library of Queensland administered them from 2014 until 2025, when arts minister John-Paul Langbroek stopped the library awarding 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 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 Wyld's treatment, delaying last year's awards.

From this year, Langbroek has handed the awards' management over to the Brisbane writers festival.