Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann has won the top prize at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for her “stunning” verse novel She Is the Earth.

Eckermann won both Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers’ Prize at the awards, taking home a total of $40,000.

The prize judges described the book — a series of poems about a woman connecting with both nature and thousands of years of history — as “sometimes gentle and sometimes sharp, both beautiful and terrible, and always profound in its exploration of healing, hope and the earth”.

It’s not the first time Eckermann has won Book of the Year at the event: She won the award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2013 for her previous verse novel Ruby Moonlight. That year, she was unable to attend the ceremony as she was visiting Ireland as the Australian poetry ambassador.

“It’s very overwhelming and very thrilling [to win],” Eckermann says. “It was 12 years ago when my brother flew to Sydney to accept a similar award from the NSW Premier’s Awards for Ruby Moonlight. For the recognition to also be given to She Is the Earth is beyond my dreams.”

This is the second year in a row that a First Nations author has won the top gong, after Gudanji and Wakaja author Debra Dank won a record four out of 14 awards in 2023 with her memoir We Come With This Place.

Other winners at the awards include Angela O’Keeffe, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction with her second novel The Sitter; Australian American journalist Christine Keneally who won the $40,000 prize for non-fiction with her exposé of abuse in Catholic orphanages, Ghosts of the Orphanage; and Aboriginal poet and artist Tais Rose Wae, who won the $30,000 prize for poetry with her debut collection Riverbed Sky Songs.

A political event

Accepting Book of the Year at the event at the State Library of NSW tonight, Eckermann, a member of the Stolen Generations, called for an end to child removal from Aboriginal communities.

She also echoed the sentiment of a number of her fellow winners — including Nicholas Brown and Anna Barnes, the winners of the awards for playwriting and screenwriting respectively — by calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

“I do plead that the world becomes a kinder place,” she said. “As we’ve heard from most of the others: that the bombs stop, starvation stops, the harvesting stops, the missing stops, and for me, who first ran away at 17 to a little place on the Nullarbor called Ooldea and found out 17 years later that my mother had been born under a tree there, stop mining my country.”

Accepting the Christina Stead Prize, O’Keeffe highlighted the plight of children in Gaza, “who for almost eight months have been relentlessly targeted and killed by Israel”; while André Dao, who won the award for new writing for his novel, Anam, about his grandfather who was a political prisoner in Vietnam, spoke about the backlash some writers and judges had received for being publicly pro-Palestine.

“Some of the judges and some of the writers involved in this year’s awards have been targeted and vilified for speaking against the ongoing atrocities being committed by the Israeli government against people in Gaza and in the West Bank. I want to say to you that I stand with you and that such attacks on writers and academics diminish us all.”

Reconnecting with purpose

She Is the Earth is Eckermann’s first book since she won one of the world’s richest literary awards, the Windham-Campbell Prize, in 2017. The win, worth $215,000, was “mind-shattering”, she says.

At the time of winning, Eckermann had only been a published author for eight years (her first book, the poetry collection little bit long time, was published in 2009).

She had $47 in her bank account and lived in a caravan in Adelaide.

“My literature career happened at a very fast pace. After winning the Windham-Campbell award, it was like the industry had grabbed hold of me and there was an expectation; I heard lots of opinions of how I should be,” she says.

So she deliberately took a step back from publishing, embarking on a “seven-year hiatus”.

“I’ve learned it was important not to be so present in the career, but to write something that I hope young people will read in 50 or a hundred years’ time,” she says.

“The seven-year hiatus got me to re-check purpose, and purpose is now very prevalent in everything that I do.”

A crossroads

That renewed sense of purpose led her to She Is the Earth, which she started writing in 2019 and finished during the “quietness of the pandemic”.

In her past work, Eckermann has written explicitly about traumatic experiences, including domestic violence, and her son being taken from her.

She knew with her new book she wanted to write about more than her personal history, instead engaging with the depths of Aboriginal cultural knowledge, going back 80,000 years.

“We’ve put all this effort into talking about this lousy 250 years. I want to talk about the other 79,750 years,” Eckermann told ABC RN’s Awaye! in 2023.

“That’s where we were healthy and spiritual people and strong people and fit people and not needy people and not judged people … When I’m writing I think about that. I want to skip over this little blip.”

The verse novel also marked a turning point in her creative practice.

“She Is the Earth also is this crossroads for me. Previously, I’d written from a cathartic place. She Is the Earth is where I really could take some time to focus on craft as well,” she tells ABC Arts.

Eckermann’s win at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards is the latest in a wave of recognition of First Nations writing over the last few years. At the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards alone, Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven won three prizes, including Book of the Year, in 2021; Tony Birch won the Christina Stead Prize in 2022; and Debra Dank won Book of the Year, among others, last year.

They join other First Nations prize winners across the country, including two recent winners of the Stella Prize: Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen, who won in 2022; and Waanyi writer Alexis Wright who, earlier this month, became the first author to win the prize twice.

“Aboriginal poetry has been around long before the colonisers arrived. I would say that it’s been there for 80,000 years,” Eckermann says.

“Everything is involved and interwoven into Aboriginal poetry. The fact that it’s thriving at the moment is because the world is catching up with the wisdom of that practice, which now we’re gifting to the page.

“We’ve always had it and assimilation hasn’t removed it. It’s just changed a little bit. Now we access our poetry and we share our poetry in a different way.”

Writing a ‘conjuring’

Angela O’Keeffe was shortlisted in 2022 for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for new writing, for her first novel, Night Blue.

It was a novel 30 years in the making. To then win the $40,000 prize for fiction for her second novel The Sitter two years later is “life-changing”, she says.

The prize will give her the time and space to write. “What I need is to be able to write and that’s what feeds me, that’s what I flourish from, and also to be able to have the work read,” she says.

“Hopefully, I will get more readers through the longlist and this win. Of course, that’s about money to some degree, but it’s just so much more about the life of the work.”

Like Night Blue, which is told through the perspective of Jackson Pollock’s controversial Blue Poles, The Sitter centres on the life of a painting. The narrator is a “conjuring” of Hortense Cézanne, who sat for 29 portraits by her husband, the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne.

O’Keeffe saw the artist’s paintings of Hortense in the flesh for the first time on a trip to France in 2017.

“I just really was quite fascinated by the fact that she looked different in each one and she looked pretty unhappy in each one,” she says.

She recalls being struck by a quote from Cézanne on one of the labels in the exhibition: “My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade.”

The author continues: “She had this reputation as being stupid, shallow; she was from a working-class background and she didn’t get his art. That’s what everyone said at the time. And I just thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be interesting to imagine how she felt?’”

Full list of winners

Book of the Year ($10,000)

She Is the Earth by Ali Cobby Eckermann (Magabala Books)

Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)

The Sitter by Angela O’Keeffe (UQP)

Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000)

Ghosts of the Orphanage by Christine Kenneally (Hachette Australia)

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)

Riverbed Sky Songs by Tais Rose Wae (Vagabond Press)

Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000)

Paradise Sands: A Story of Enchantment by Levi Pinfold (Walker Books Australia)

Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000)

The Quiet and the Loud by Helena Fox (Pan Macmillan Australia)

Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)

Sex Magick by Nicholas Brown (Griffin Theatre Company/Currency Press)

Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)

Safe Home, Episode 1 by Anna Barnes (Kindling Pictures)

Indigenous Writers’ Prize ($30,000)

She Is the Earth by Ali Cobby Eckermann (Magabala Books)

Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000)

Stay for Dinner by Sandhya Parappukkaran, illustrated by Michelle Pereira (Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing)

UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($10,000)

Anam by André Dao (Penguin Random House Australia)

University of Sydney People’s Choice Award ($5,000)

The God of No Good by Sita Walker (Ultimo Press)