Too Afraid to Cry

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Author: Ali Cobby Eckermann
Winner Windham Campbell Prize 2017

Too Afraid to Cry is a memoir that, in bare blunt prose and piercingly lyrical verse, gives witness to the human cost of policies that created the Stolen Generations of Indigenous people in Australia. Read More

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"It is not long, this book. It can be read in a sitting. And it may change the way you think, about Australia, or about Aboriginal people, in ways more sophisticated literary exercises would not." - The Australian

Too Afraid to Cry is a narrative of good and evil, terror and happiness, despair and courage. It is the story of a people profoundly wronged, told through the frank eyes of a child, and the troubled mind of that child as an adult, whose life was irretrievably changed by being tricked away from her family and adopted into a German Lutheran family.

What makes this book sing is not only Ali Cobby-Eckermann’s strong and unique narrative voice and her ability to cut to the essence of things in her poetry, but also the astounding courage with which she leads the reader through the complex account of a life in free-fall and a journey to wholeness through reconnection with her birth family and its ageless culture and wisdom.

This is a brave book, written by a woman who has faced her demons, transformed her suffering into a work of art, and found her true sitting place in the world.

Terry Whitebeach

"[T]he memoir is a testament to the damage that can follow when children are removed from family and the subsequent search for identity that follows."

- The Age
- The Sydney Morning Herald

ALI COBBY ECKERMANN enjoyed great success with her first collection of poetry, little bit long time, which was followed by Kami and Love Dreaming and Other Poems, published by Vagabond Press, and more recently, Inside My Mother, published by Giramondo.

Her first verse novel, His Father’s Eyes, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011. Ruby Moonlight, her second verse novel, won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2013.

Ali’s writing reflects her journey to reconnect with her Yankunytjatjara / Kokatha family. Her much anticipated memoir, Too Afraid to Cry, was awarded the Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2016 . Too Afraid to Cry has also been published in India, where Ali delivered the 2015 Navayana Annual Lecture in Delhi.

"What makes Too Afraid to Cry a remarkable narrative of reconnection is the way in which Cobby Eckermann negotiates its painful territory without the dramatics of blame but with all the moral force of affective truth."
- Cordite Poetry Review

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PRODUCT INFO
ISBN: 9781921325243
Genre: Memoir
Size: 140 x 210 mm
Format: Paperback, 218 pages
Release: February 2013
Rights held: World
Rights sold: India (Navayana), US and Canada (Norton/Liveright)

Too Afraid to Cry

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