Eleven years ago, she won NSW’s most prestigious book prize. She just did it again

Poet Ali Cobby Eckermann has taken out the book of the year prize in the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for her work She is the Earth, a verse novel. It’s the second time she has won book of the year, winning for the first time in 2013 for another verse novel, Ruby Moonlight.

Eckermann is also the winner of the Indigenous writer’s prize, for which she will receive $30,000, with an additional $10,000 for the book of the year award. Established in 1979, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards were presented at the NSW State Library on Monday night, kicking off the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

The Yankunytjatjara poet described She is the Earth as “the poetry song book that arises when you walk Country and you know your ancestors are holding your hand”.

“For me, that’s how I imagine the process of writing She is the Earth,” she told this masthead, describing it as a verse novel in which, “every page is a poem, and it reads like a story”.

Eckermann was not published until her mid-30s, even though as a young child she knew she wanted to be a writer. She recalls trying very hard to be a good student but always ending up in trouble. “The constraints of curriculum squashed that and so, what a blessing to get this opportunity to do this again as a grandmother,” Eckermann says.

Her mother was born at Ooldea soakage on the Nullarbor Plain and her grandmother was born at Indulkana in the far north of South Australia. All three generations, including Eckermann herself, had children stolen, tricked away, or adopted out, with Eckermann not meeting her birth mother until she was 30.

Pursuing art and writing helped her work through the trauma of multi-generational forced removals.

“It’s quite a process to be a relinquished child and then four years later to become the relinquishing mother,” she says. “Even though [this book] began from a traumatic time, there was a different energy that allowed me to focus more on the description and the beauty.”

It was different from the cathartic process of her previous writing which had poured out of her. Work on She Is The Earth began with the arrival of the pandemic. “But [it] was fostered in that unexpected forced stillness, to be in one place – the town that I live in by choice has a population of under 100 – so we listened to the birds, and we listened to the wind, and we listened to the wind under the bird’s wing.”