It's described as a telephone call of a lifetime: that moment when an unsuspecting writer receives the ground shaking news that they have won one of the world's richest prizes for literature.
For Ali Cobby Eckermann, a celebrated Aboriginal poet and visual artist from Adelaide who has published and performed her work internationally and lives in a caravan with her elderly adopted mother, it couldn't be truer.
Even now, Eckermann, close to tears, can still barely believe her prize-winning fortune as she recounts how a message unexpectedly popped in her email box last Thursday asking her to call the judges of the Windham-Campbell Prizes.
''I saw the email and didn't know what it meant. It was night when I rang and the judging panel was gathered at a restaurant. They did a big clink [with glasses] on loudspeaker to celebrate.''
Now in their fifth year, the prizes were established in 2013 with a gift from American writer Donald Windham in memory of his partner, Sandy M. Campbell, and are administered by Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Eckermann has won individual prize money of $US165,000 ($215,000) awarded in recognition of her poetry. The endowment is life-changing, bringing financial security where she had none before the phone call.
''I'm living in a caravan now. I like my caravan, I live a very simple life. I am looking after my old adopted mother in Adelaide and I could not foresee that this would have happened. My son and grandsons are returning from Western Australia soon so it would be lovely to establish a place to enjoy my family and watch them grow instead of spending all my time going to them.''
This was the first year in which the Windham-Campbell Prizes included poetry among the fields of fiction, nonfiction and drama.
Prize recipients are nominated confidentially based on a body of work and supporting critical material and judged anonymously.
The call the winners receive from program director Michael Kelleher is the first time they have learned of their consideration. ''I'm fascinated that they even knew about me,'' Eckermann said.
Eckermann's first book of poetry Little Bit Long Time was published by the Australian Poetry Centre as part of the New Poets series in 2009.
Judges praised her ''substantial and formally innovative body of work'', including the award-winning 2015 collection Inside My Mother, which Eckermann has described as an "emotional timeline" of the Stolen Generations.
In her memoir Too Afraid to Cry, published in 2013, Eckermann related how she had been tricked away from her mother as a baby, repeating the trauma her mother had suffered when she was taken from her grandmother many years before. Eckermann, in turn, had to give her own child up for adoption.
Too Afraid to Cry was awarded a Tangkanungku Pintyanthi Fellowship, and the verse novel Ruby Moonlight (2012), won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.
''I like to think the prize recognises an honest truth around Stolen Generations, for writing around an emotional truth, not academic. I've learnt to embrace my emotional baggage and turn it into poetry.'' Her prose is representative of a ''generational voice, not a singular voice''.
Eckermann is the third Australian winner, after writer Helen Garner (2016) and playwright, poet and essayist Noelle Janaczewska (2014). Past winners also include Jim Crace, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Edmund de Waal, Aminatta Forna, James Salter and Nadeem Aslam.
In addition to her work as a writer, Eckermann is founder of Australia's first Aboriginal writers retreat, and has edited a special issue of the journal Southerly on Aboriginal writing.
Eckermann will join her fellow winners to attend a three-day literary festival at Yale in September to celebrate their work and introduce them to new audiences
The prize money will give her financial security to complete a sequel to Ruby Moonlight and she has plans to write her first novel, a love story featuring an Australian and the desert people of India.
This year's Windham-Campbell Prize recipients are: in fiction, Trinidad-born Andr?? Alexis and Caribbean activist/scholar Erna Brodber; in non-fiction, Harvard professor of history, Maya Jasanoff, and New Zealand writer Ashleigh Young; in poetry, Eckermann and Carolyn Forch??; and in drama, US artists, Marina Carr and Ike Holter.
