When Omar Musa discovered he'd won Australia's premier book prize, he literally stopped in his tracks. The author from Queanbeyan in NSW took six years and 21 drafts to write his second novel Fierceland, and said he never expected his efforts to be so recognised. The winner of the prestigious $60,000 book prize, awarded annually to a novel of the highest literary merit about Australian life, was announced at a ceremony in Sydney on Wednesday evening. He was nervous Fierceland might romanticise or oversimplify Borneo, an island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. Fierceland won the $25,000 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction in February, while Musa's 2014 novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the Miles Franklin and the International Dublin Literary awards.