Nearly 5000 magpie attacks are logged in Australia each year, but Kailum Graves has good reason to feel warmly towards the swooping birds.
The Coorparoo author has just won a $15,000 literary prize for his story about the tense relations between magpies and humans.
The Magpies Have Unionised nabbed Graves the 2026 Furphy Literary Prize in a ceremony at the Shepparton Art Gallery in northern Victoria on Saturday.
In the 4669-word story, magpies who are tired of being maligned as “aggressive” and “sky bastards” demand an apology from a local council and begin a targeted swooping campaign.
“We reject these characterisations. We are not aggressive. We are parents,” the birds write in an email.
Among their demands are the replacement of the phrase “magpie attack season” with “heightened interspecies boundary awareness period”.
Furphy Literary Awards judge John Harms said the story was brilliantly written, fanciful and familiar.
“Kailum Graves’ allegorical masterpiece introduces magpies that will bring a tear to your eye in a way that magpies never have before,” he said.
Graves, 41, said he had a grudging respect for magpies, who were a part of life in Coorparoo.
“I feel bad for them because we’ve invaded their space, but we’re painting them as the aggressor,” he said.
“The signs should be more aimed at us looking after the magpies as opposed to us being the victims of the swooping because they’re really just protecting their young.”
According to Magpie Alert, Queensland had over 1000 reported swooping attacks in 2025, out of nearly 5000 nationwide.
Graves’ ultimately moving story takes the point of view of a council worker and mother who becomes an interspecies mediator and whose young daughter is terrified of the birds.
Satirising local government, the story was inspired by Graves’ recent stay in Germany, where he was struck both by the absence of birdsong and the prevalence of government bureaucracy.
“I missed birds, I didn’t realise how much I loved them – even just bird songs in the morning and butcher birds in Brisbane singing,” Graves said.
“In Germany, they’re the experts of pointless bureaucracy. Once I went to get a parcel at the post office, and I took my Australian passport and then they refused to give me my parcel, saying ‘it’s not real ID’.”
Graves studied philosophy and art history at the University of Queensland and has carved out a practice as a conceptual media artist concerned with the internet.
He has been shortlisted for the Brisbane Portrait Prize several times.
Pivoting to literature, he has written a time-travel novel, currently with his American agent seeking a publisher.
The Furphy Literary Prize is named after Australian author Joseph Furphy, who wrote the novel Such Is Life (1903) and whose family name has become synonymous with tall tales.
The Magpies Have Unionised, which beat 880 other submissions to win the award, took more than 60 drafts to write.
It will be published in a 2026 anthology and is available to read online. Graves has also been invited to a residency program in Shepparton.
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