Australian composer Liza Lim has been announced as the winner of the 2026 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Presented by the University of Louisville, the award is among the world’s richest classical music honours, with a cash prize of $100,000 USD ($152,799 AUD).

Liza Lim at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Photo © Fiona Wolf/University of Sydney

Lim has earned the award for her new cello concerto, A Sutured World. Written for German-French cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, the work was co-commissioned by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO), the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Amsterdam Cello Biennale and Casa da Música Porto. It earned its world premiere in October 2024 with the BRSO, and its Australian premiere with the MSO in March 2025.

The recording of the work with Altstaedt and the BRSO earned a five-star Limelight review and was an Editor’s Choice pick for September 2025.

“A Sutured World honours scars that constitute new attributes of beauty, rather than imperfections or flaws to be hidden. Sensitivity, instability and the idea of ‘making hallucination audible’ are rendered musically with close attention to the almost infinite timbral possibilities of the cello,” wrote Limelight‘s Lisa MacKinney.

“Never less than...