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Sarah Holland-Batt

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Sarah Holland-Batt
Holland-Batt in 2021
Born
Southport, Queensland, Australia
EducationPhD, MFA, MPhil, BA (Hons I)
Alma materUniversity of Queensland, New York University
Known forPoetry
Notable workAria, The Hazards, The Jaguar
Websitewww.sarahhollandbatt.com

Sarah Holland-Batt is a contemporary Australian poet, critic, and academic.

Early life and education

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Born in Southport, Queensland, Sarah Holland-Batt grew up in Australia and Denver, Colorado.[1]

She was educated at the University of Queensland, where she received First Class Honours in Literary Studies, an MPhil and PhD, and at New York University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and attained an M.F.A.[2]

Career

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Holland-Batt is the author of three award-winning volumes of poetry, Aria, The Hazards and The Jaguar, and a book of essays on contemporary poetry, Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry. She is also the editor of two anthologies of contemporary Australian poetry, Black Inc's The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017.[3] Aria, Holland-Batt's first book, received the 2007 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, and was subsequently published by the University of Queensland Press in 2008. Aria subsequently won the Anne Elder Award and the Judith Wright Prize, and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Mary Gilmore Prize.[4]

The Hazards, Holland-Batt's second volume, was published in 2015, and went on to win Australia's foremost prize for poetry, the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, in 2016. The Hazards was also shortlisted for numerous other prestigious awards, including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Poetry Prize, and was named as a book of the year in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Australian Book Review.[2] Holland-Batt's third collection, The Jaguar, was published in 2022,[5] and received the 2022 Book of the Year Award from The Australian.[6]

Holland-Batt is the recipient of international fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, a Hawthornden Castle residency, and an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Residency at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome. Her poems have appeared in numerous international newspapers, periodicals and magazines, including The New Yorker and Poetry, among others, and have been widely anthologised. In 2016, she was awarded the two-year Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship from the Myer Foundation.[7]

Holland-Batt has served as a judge of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, and the Australian Book Review's Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.[8] From 2014 until 2019, she was the poetry editor of Island Magazine.[9] She is presently chair of Australian Book Review.[10]

Holland-Batt is Professor of Creative Writing & Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology.[2] She is also an active critic, writing for publications including The Australian, The Monthly and Australian Book Review.[2] The Australian appointed Holland-Batt in 2020 as their columnist for poetry.[11]

Critical response

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Holland-Batt's formal imagination transports the reader fluently through mythological, personal, artistic, geographical and historical landscapes. Violence, caused by the pursuit of beauty or truth, is appraised with virtuosity and unfailing precision. In the opening poem, "Medusa", Holland-Batt gives us the striking image of the drifting mind, 'pure and poisonous', drawing in its shadow as the soul billows out. This dichotomy portends the poet's almost surgical objectivity, her capacity for opening up subjects. Yet she animates these poems with the spirit of Perseus, courageously risking what is known for a language 'with a force that could break our lives'... Holland-Batt entwines the past into a rich and inventive lyricism of the present.

Kenneth Slessor Prize citation for The Hazards[12]

Holland-Batt's work has frequently been praised for its lyricism, linguistic precision, and metaphorical dexterity.[citation needed] Holland-Batt's debut collection, Aria, was described as "most impressive and haunting" by The Sydney Morning Herald, and as a "knockout" by leading Australian poetry critic Martin Duwell.[13] Writing in The Age, Robert Adamson described Aria as evidence that "Holland-Batt appears to be a major poet from the start".[14] In The Canberra Times, critic Peter Pierce likened Holland-Batt's "energetic approach to imagery" to that of Sylvia Plath, and praised her awareness of the "twin reserves of myth and metaphor".[15]

The Hazards, Holland-Batt's second volume, was praised as "a virtuoso performance" by The Sydney Morning Herald,[16] and "an absolute gem of a collection overspilling with poems of compelling urgency and dazzling accomplishment" by The Australian.[17] Writing in Australian Book Review, Cassandra Atherton commented on Holland-Batt's "stark and sumptuous lyricism" and described The Hazards as "a thrilling psycho-geographical evocation of physical and internal landscapes".[18] The judges of the Western Australian Premier's Book Prize observed that The Hazards is marked by "a kind of tough lyricism and an exacting use of language [that] makes for dramatic, assertive poetry" that imagines, "often through surprising metaphors, the 'real and imagined hazards' of living".[19] Geoff Page, writing in The Australian, likewise noted Holland-Batt's facility with metaphor: "The Hazards is dense with metaphorical energy ... in the service of substantial moral and psychological insights."[20]

Holland-Batt's third volume, The Jaguar, centres on the decline and death of the poet's father from Parkinson's disease.[21] Critics responding to The Jaguar have focussed on Holland-Batt's command of metaphor. Poet Judith Beveridge, writing in The Australian, observed that the poems in The Jaguar "are intensely moving not only for their tragic content but because of the way in which the subject matter is explored through dramatic and metaphorical ingenuity. Few poets can achieve this level of transformation, allowing their images to move with argumentative force."[22] Geoff Page, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, states that "Holland-Batt’s highly metaphorical style has been influential on numerous younger Australian poets, although few seem to equal her almost conversational ease in the medium," and observes that Holland-Batt deploys satire and plain diction alongside "denser, more metaphoric writing": "it’s a mark of Holland-Batt’s self-confidence that she can employ such a sardonic manner alongside other poems that are more orthodoxly poignant."[23]

Bibliography

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Poetry

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Collections
  • Holland-Batt, Sarah (2008). Aria. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. ISBN 9780702236754.
  • — (2015). The Hazards. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. ISBN 978-0-7022-5359-1.
  • — (2022). The Jaguar. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. ISBN 9780702265501.

Essays

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  • — (2021). Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry. University of Queensland Press. Collection of 50 columns on poetry from The Australian

Anthologies (edited)

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Anthologies (contributor)

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  • The Best Australian Poems. (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015)
  • The Best Australian Poetry. Ed. David Brooks. (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2008)
  • The Puncher and Wattman Anthology of Australian Poetry. Ed. John Leonard. (Sydney: Puncher & Wattman, 2010)
  • Being Human. Ed. Neil Astley. (U.K.: Bloodaxe Books, 2011)
  • Thirty Australian Poets. Ed. Felicity Plunkett. (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2011)
  • Young Poets: An Australian Anthology. Ed. John Leonard. (Melbourne: John Leonard Press, 2011)
  • The Best Australian Stories. (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011, 2012)
  • The Turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry. Ed. John Kinsella (Louisiana: Desperation Press/Turnrow Books, 2014).
List of poems
  • "Epithalamium" (2018) Holland-Batt, Sarah (17 September 2018). "Epithalamium". The New Yorker. Vol. 94, no. 28. p. 52. Retrieved 13 November 2018.

Book reviews

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Awards

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References

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  1. ^ New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards 2008
  2. ^ a b c d "Professor Sarah Holland-Batt". Queensland University of Technology. Retrieved 19 August 2021.
  3. ^ "Black Inc. announces 2016 'Best Australian' editors", 4 March 2016, Books+Publishing
  4. ^ "Sarah Holland-Batt", UQP
  5. ^ "The Jaguar", UQP
  6. ^ [1], The Australian, 8 Dec 2022
  7. ^ "Holland-Batt awarded Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship", Books+Publishing, 25 November 2016
  8. ^ "Australian Poetry Elizabeth Jolley Prize". Retrieved 30 April 2023.
  9. ^ "Working with Words: Sarah Holland-Batt". Wheeler Centre. 28 May 2014. Retrieved 11 August 2021.
  10. ^ Review, Australian Book (6 April 2010). "ABR Board". Australian Book Review.
  11. ^ Sorensen, Rosemary (14 February 2020). "Handout for arts journalism 'misses the mark'". Daily Review. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  12. ^ "Kenneth Slessor Prize citation". Retrieved 30 April 2023.
  13. ^ Duwell, Martin. "Sarah Holland-Batt: Aria | Australian Poetry Review".
  14. ^ Adamson, Robert (13 December 2008). "Readings of Comfort and Joy". The Age.
  15. ^ Pierce, Peter (30 August 2008). "High Praise Indeed for Poets' Power and Potency". The Canberra Times. p. 16.
  16. ^ Ladd, Mike (16 October 2015). "The Hazards review: Sarah Holland-Batt's striking second collection of poetry". The Sydney Morning Herald.
  17. ^ Savige, Jaya (19 December 2015). "Books of the Year". The Weekend Australian. p. 18.
  18. ^ Atherton, Cassandra (30 September 2015). "Cassandra Atherton reviews 'The Hazards' by Sarah Holland-Batt, 'Conversations I've Never Had' by Caitlin Maling, 'Here Be Dragons' by Dennis Greene, and 'The Guardians' by Lucy Dougan". Australian Book Review.
  19. ^ a b "WA Premier's Book Awards". State Library of Western Australia.
  20. ^ Page, Geoff (29 August 2015). "New Poetry". The Australian. p. 21.
  21. ^ Stafford, Andrew (14 May 2022). "Watching someone decline can be beyond language". The Guardian.
  22. ^ Beveridge, Judith (28 April 2022). "Father and Further in Sarah Holland-Batt's The Jaguar". The Australian.
  23. ^ Page, Geoff (2 May 2022). "An Affecting Meditation on Mortality". The Sydney Morning Herald.
  24. ^ "Aria / Sarah Holland-Batt". Trove. Retrieved 20 June 2024.
  25. ^ "2009 Literary Awards shortlist - Department of the Premier and Cabinet". wayback.archive-it.org.
  26. ^ ACT Government;; PositionTitle=Director; SectionName=Corporate Management; Corporate=Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate (24 June 2022). "ACT Government Media Releases". Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  27. ^ "Spoiled for Choice: The Age Book of the Year Shortlist", (Books, Entertainment), The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 August 2009
  28. ^ "The Australian". Retrieved 30 April 2023.
  29. ^ "Prime Minister's Literary awards 2016: Lisa Gorton and Charlotte Wood share fiction prize", The Guardian, 9 November 2016
  30. ^ "AFAL 2016" (PDF). Retrieved 30 April 2023.
  31. ^ "NSW Premier's Prizes 2016". Retrieved 30 April 2023.
  32. ^ "State Library of Queensland". www.slq.qld.gov.au.
  33. ^ "Holland-Batt awarded $100,000 Judy Harris fellowship". Books+Publishing. 28 June 2021. Retrieved 28 June 2021.
  34. ^ Overington, Caroline (8 December 2022). "Love of her father endures in the wonder of words". The Australian.
  35. ^ "Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry". State Library of NSW. 23 March 2023. Retrieved 1 March 2023.
  36. ^ "Griffin Poetry Prize". 15 March 2023.
  37. ^ "Holland-Batt wins 2023 Stella Prize for 'The Jaguar'". Books+Publishing. 28 April 2023. Retrieved 27 April 2023.
  38. ^ "Winners of the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards announced". Media statements. Queensland Government. 5 September 2023. Retrieved 6 September 2023.
  39. ^ "Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2023 shortlists announced". Books+Publishing. 26 October 2023. Retrieved 26 October 2023.
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