Jane Harper is an author who won the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript for her novel The Dry. The $15,000 award was presented at the opening night of the 2015 Emerging Writers Festival. Harper's winning manuscript was chosen from a shortlist of three from more than 130 entries. The Dry tells `the story of a city policeman who is dragged back to the country township he fled years earlier to investigate a multiple homicide'. The Victorian Premier's Literary Award, for an Unpublished Manuscript, is administered by the Wheeler Centre. The Dry won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Derbut Fiction and as Book of the Year. It was also the winner of the 2018 British Book Awards, Crime and Thriller book of the year, and won the 2018 Barry Award for Best First Novel. Her second book entitled Force of Nature was published in May 2018, which won the 2018 Davitt Award for Readers' choice. The Lost Man is her third book and was published in October 2018.
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