Ali Cobby Eckermann - Windham-Campbell Prize Winner 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. 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 taken away from her Aboriginal family when she was a young child and then adopted out. 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
"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
"What makes Too Afraid to Cry a remarkable narrative of reconnection is the way in which Cobby Eckerman negotiates its painful territory without the dramatics of blame but with all the moral force of affective truth." - Cordite Poetry Review
