Ruby Moonlight

Through a series of compact lyrics, Ali Cobby Eckermann's Ruby Moonlight tells the story of a young Aboriginal woman in the late nineteenth century who survives the massacre of her entire family. Wandering alone through Ngadjuri land, in South Australia, she encounters a luckless Irish trapper whose loneliness matches her own. Drawn together for comfort, they discover a momentary paradise along riverbanks and across arid plains that proves fragile in the face of frontier violence and colonization.

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a poet and artist from South Australia whose work has been published and celebrated around the world. She is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Ruby Moonlight, published by Magabala Books in Australia in 2012 and Flood Editions in North America in 2015. It was named the New South Wales Book of the Year and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, among other awards. She also published a memoir, Too Afraid to Cry, in 2012. In 2013 Ali toured Ireland as Australia's Poetry Ambassador, and in 2017 she received the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University. She describes herself as "a dreamer, a gardener, a reader and a nomad."