Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha poet Ali Cobby Eckermann has taken home the top prize at this year’s New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.
Eckermann won book of the year for her taut 96-page metaphysical verse novel, She is the Earth, which explores the weight of intergenerational grief while also commemorating the healing power of Country.
Eckermann’s book also took home the Indigenous writers prize, capping off her evening’s prize money to a total of $40,000. Accepting the award on Monday night at the State Library of NSW, Eckermann gave a powerful speech, pleading for the country to “stop taking children away from Aboriginal families.”
“The biggest gift in my life was finding my family — meeting my mother, my brother and sister, the whole mob, and that the Eckermann family supported and didn’t fall into all the prejudice, supporting my journey,” she said.
“I’m very grateful — I would have a huge list of people to think. But trauma teaches you to look deeply. I do want to thank people who can be kind not at the expense of someone else.”
“I do plead that the world becomes a kinder place…[that] starvation stops.”
She ended her speech with a call to action: “Stop mining my country.”
Judges praised her winning book as “a stunning verse novel that takes the reader on a journey of love and grief, through land, sky and water, and all places in between”.
It is “both other-worldly and inner-worldly, with the distinction between the two realms fuzzy and flowing across each other to astonishing effect”.
Senior judge, Dr Bernadette Brennan said the judges for this year’s awards were “unanimous in their praise for and excitement about the breadth, depth and brilliance of contemporary Australian writing.”
“They were thrilled by the ambition of these works, the preparedness, across all categories, of the writers to take risks and to challenge and reimagine established ideas of genre, voice, subject matter and style. These winners offer just a glimpse of the diversity and range of Australian voices telling the stories we all need to hear.”
In her review of the work, author Sian Cain described the book as one that “…feels both dreamlike and visceral, the talented poet making a nebulous plane of existence feel miraculously tangible…[it is] beautifully metaphysical…charts this journey of sound, light, rock and sea; we witness the creation of Country.”
She is the Earth is Eckermann’s first work in eight years, and the poet’s second title to take home the major prize. In 2013, her book, Ruby Moonlight, won book of the year. She made international headlines in 2017 when she was awarded the major US literary prize, Windham-Campbell, worth $215,000, which is given to a writer who is unaware they are even in the running.
Eckermann has been working in South Australia for many decades, developing works across multiple disciplines, and becoming known for her visceral poetic style.
Her poetry has been published in prestigious international journals including The Poetry Foundation, and her collections, “little bit long time” and “Inside My Mother” have won many literary awards.
Several other prizes at the Premier’s Literary Awards on Monday night were awarded to women, including Angela O’Keefe, whose novel The Sitter took home the Christina Stead prize for fiction, while journalist Christine Kenneally won the Douglas Stewart prize for nonfiction for her book, Ghosts of the Orphanage, which investigates violence, abuse, and murder within Catholic care institutions.
Aboriginal poet and weaver Tais Rose Wae won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry with her debut collection, Riverbed Sky Songs, and YA author Helena Fox won the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature for her teenage novel The Quiet and the Loud.
The Multicultural NSW award went to Sandhya Parappukkaran for her children’s book Stay for Dinner, while Brisbane-based English and Literature teacher, Sita Walker won the people’s choice award for The God of No Good, a intergenerational memoir about six women and their intertwining lives.