Congratulations to Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, her book she is the earth has won both Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writers' Prize at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.

This 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.

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”.

Accepting Book of the Year at the event, Eckermann echoed the sentiment of a number of her fellow winners by calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

"I do plead that the world becomes a kinder place. 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."