Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ali Cobby Eckermann (born 1963) is an Australian poet of Aboriginal Australian ancestry. She is a Yankunytjatjara woman born on Kaurna land in South Australia.

Eckermann has written poetry collections, verse novels and a memoir, and has been shortlisted for or won several literary awards. In 2017, she won the international Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry. She is a two-time winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Book of the Year (2013, 2024), the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (2013) and Indigenous Writers' Prize (2024). She has travelled extensively, performing her poetry.

Early life Ali Cobby Eckermann was born Penelope Rae Cobby at the Kate Cocks Memorial Babies’ Home in Adelaide, traditional home of the Kaurna people, in 1963. She was adopted as a baby by a Lutheran couple, Clarrie and Frieda Eckermann.

Eckermann, her mother and her grandmother were all stolen, tricked or adopted away from their birth families, becoming part of the Stolen Generations.

She grew up in a loving supportive home, but she was assaulted sexually by a family friend when she seven years old, and experienced ongoing abuse and racism while growing up. At 17 she left home with a man with whom she lived for two years, but whom she left due to his violence. She returned home, only to discover she was pregnant, and gave birth when she was 19. Her son was adopted out.

Aboriginal writers that she met through festivals and workshops were her early inspirations, authors and poets such as Boori Pryor, Lionel Fogarty, Bill Neidje, Eva Johnson, Terry Whitebeach, Kim Scott, Romaine Morton and Alexis Wright. Ruby Moonlight was awarded both Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2013 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards.

Eckermann founded Australia's first Aboriginal Writers Retreat in Koolunga, in a 130-year-old general store which she restored.

Her memoir Too Afraid to Cry won the inaugural Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature in 2016.

Verse novels Eckermann has written three verse novels, His Father's Eyes, Ruby Moonlight and She is the Earth.

Ruby Moonlight is set in remote South Australia in the 1880s. It explores, writes Sarah Holland-Batt, "broader ideas about colonialism’s hierarchies and power structures, and its lingering historical impact on the first peoples of this country, on language, and on the very landscape itself. One of the most remarkable things about Ruby Moonlight is the subtlety with which its political implications are handled: Eckermann invites (rather than dictates) political readings of what is, at heart, a simple and highly engaging narrative."

Other activities , Eckermann is on the board of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN).

Awards and nominations 2013 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, winner of Book of the Year and Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for Ruby Moonlight 2014 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature John Bray Poetry Award, shortlisted for Ruby Moonlight 2015 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, shortlisted for Indigenous Writers' Prize for Inside My Mother 2016 Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship for Too Afraid to Cry 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, shortlisted for Inside My Mother 2017 Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes for Poetry 2018 Australia Council for the Arts Literature Fellowship 2024 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, winner of Book of the Year and Indigenous Writers' Prize for She Is the Earth 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, shortlisted for She Is the Earth