She is the Earth

Judges' comments

She is the Earth is 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. This surreal creation story contains many other stories and worlds within the whole. A story of breath and breadth, it is both other-worldly and inner-worldly, with the distinction between the two realms fuzzy and flowing across each other to astonishing effect.

Ali Cobby Eckermann writes in a poetics of self-emergence in which the spectral is made solid through an eloquent economy of language and lifeforms. Each word of this verse novel is deeply considered and rich with meaning, forming as a whole a narrative which is sometimes gentle and sometimes sharp, both beautiful and terrible, and always profound in its exploration of healing, hope and the earth. Each word reads as a gift to the reader.

The judges chose She is the Earth as Book of the Year because they considered it to be a work of extraordinary generosity that invites readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to journey with Cobby Eckermann through her experience and understanding of Country.