Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His short stories and novels have been widely translated, won many national and international prizes and been adapted for film, television, radio and the theatre. He has also written plays, screenplays, journalism and film criticism and edited two international anthologies of stories.

The Shark Net won the 2000 Brisbane Courier-Mail Book of the year Award, the 2000 Western Australian Premier's Non-fiction Book Award and the 2001 vision Australia Braille Book of the Year Award.

Written with the same lyrical intensity and spellbinding prose that has won Robert Drewe's fiction international acclaim, The Shark Net is set in the 1950s in a city haunted by the menace of an elusive serial killer. Drewe's youth in the middle-class seaside suburb of Perth, Australia-often described as the most isolated city in the world-takes a sinister turn when a social outcast (who turns out to be an employee of Drewe's father) embarks on a five-year murder spree. This unusual memoir brilliantly evokes the confluence of adolescent innocence and sexual awakening while a hare-lipped killer who eventually murders eight people, including one of Drewe's friends, lurks in the shadows.