A metaphysical verse novel by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann has won book of the year at the New South Wales premier’s literary awards.
She is the Earth, the first work published by Eckermann in eight years, was awarded the book of the year on Monday night, as well as the Indigenous writers category, worth a combined $40,000.
It is the second time Eckermann has won book of the year in the NSW Premier’s Literary awards, having won in 2013 for her book Ruby Moonlight.
While that recognition set her on the path of becoming a professional writer, it did not translate to financial security. Four years later when Eckermann learned she had won the world’s richest literary prize, Yale University’s A$215,000 Windham Campbell prize, she had $47 in the bank and was living in a caravan.
Judges described She is the Earth 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 was “both other-worldly and inner-worldly, with the distinction between the two realms fuzzy and flowing across each other to astonishing effect”.
From her home in the South Australian town of Koolunga, Eckermann said that She is the Earth emanated from a deep sense of reconnection with Country, kin and self, something she achieved by “learning to sit quietly and listening to that … poetic voice”.
A member of the Stolen Generations – she was not reunited with her birth mother or her own son, who was taken from her in infancy, until she was in her 30s – Eckermann said her writing had moved on from being a source of catharsis to healing.
Both Ruby Moonlight and She is the Earth are categorised as verse novels and Eckermann challenges claims by some critics that the latter has been incorrectly labelled as such.
“Are there rules the industry can put around Aboriginal writing?” she asks. “It’s not a new form in our expressionism. Poetry lives in and on our land. Poetry comes from our relationship with nature.
“There’s a part of our process in writing, prose and poetry, that can’t be defined under a white microscope, because it’s organic, it’s universal. It’s so free. It doesn’t have form. It’s in our senses. It’s in the air. It’s in the soil. It’s in the water. It’s deep within us.”
Also on Monday, Angela O’Keefe won the Christina Stead prize for fiction for her novel The Sitter and journalist Christine Kenneally won the Douglas Stewart prize for nonfiction for her expose on Catholic care institutions, Ghosts of the Orphanage.
O’Keeffe’s winning novel The Sitter, narrated by artist Paul Cézanne’s historically maligned wife Marie-Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, was lauded by the Guardian upon its release last year as “compelling and playful”.
O’Keefe said the idea for the book came to her while she was writing her first novel, Night Blue, which is unconventionally narrated by Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles. O’Keeffe said the day prime minister Gough Whitlam announced the National Gallery of Australia would purchase of Blue Poles for $1.3m was the only time she could recall her parents discussing art in her childhood home: “They went ballistic.”
The writer came across multiple portraits Cézanne had done of his glum looking wife, Hortense, in Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in 2017 while she was finishing Night Blue.
“Something just sort of goes off, it’s like a tuning fork, it just sort of dings” she said. “Seeing these portraits and registering that she looks so sad. And then reading about the fact that they’d had such an unhappy marriage.
“Hortense was very much dismissed. [Cézanne] and his friends all said she didn’t know anything about art. She was stupid. He told his mother, ‘My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade.’
“There were all these stories about her having burned her mother in law’s possessions, and she’d refuse to come to Cézanne’s deathbed, she really was portrayed as quite evil. And I thought, rather than try and refute those stories, why don’t we step into them and make them bigger in a sense? It started to take off when I did that.”
Other winners in the NSW premier’s literary awards included Tais Rose Wae for her collection of poetry Riverbed Sky Songs, Levi Pinfold for his children’s book Paradise Sands: A Story of Enchantment, Helena Fox for her teenage novel The Quiet and the Loud, and Nicholas Brown for his play Sex Magick.
The Multicultural NSW award went to Sandhya Parappukkaran for her children’s book Stay for Dinner, the new writing category went to André Dao for his novel Anam, and Sita Walker won the people’s choice award for The God of No Good.
