Robert Drewe (b. 1943), author, grew up in Perth, where he worked as a junior reporter with the West Australian from 1961 to 1964. Gaining a job with the Age, he moved to Melbourne; he was literary editor at the Australian before he began writing fiction, and he has written intermittently for the Bulletin, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald since. His first novel, The Savage Crows, was published in 1975. He won Walkley awards for his journalism in 1976 and 1982. His short story collection The Bay of Contented Men (1989) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Three more novels followed before The Drowner (1997) which won a slew of awards including the SA, WA, NSW and Victorian Premiers' awards for fiction. The Shark Net, a blend of autobiography and fiction, won the WA Premier's Prize for Non- Fiction and the Courier-Mail Book of the Year in 2000, was adapted for ABC and BBC TV in 2003, and is now in widespread use on school curricula. Drewe has also edited a number of story collections. His recent works include the novel Grace (2005); Montebello (2012), a sequel to The Shark Net; The Local Wildlife (2013), a collection of stories based in the area around Byron Bay in northern New South Wales; and the novel Whipbird (2017).
