Acclaimed Brisbane poet Sarah Holland-Batt has been awarded the prestigious 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.
The QUT Creative Writing academic, award-winning poet, editor and critic won the prize for The Hazards, her much-lauded second collection of poetry.
QUT’s Executive Dean of Creative Industries, Professor Mandy Thomas, said the award was a stunning achievement by Holland-Batt who is swiftly becoming one of Australia’s most esteemed poets.
“Sarah was up against a remarkably strong field in the poetry category, which included Australia’s leading poet Les Murray AO,” Professor Thomas said.
“To win the Prime Minister's Literary Awards Poetry category is a wonderful validation of Sarah’s breathtaking talent and a great endorsement of QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and just how world-class it is. I congratulate Sarah on her latest triumph and am sure there will be many more.”
Ms Holland-Batt, a Senior Lecturer with QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty, has attracted international acclaim since her first collection – Aria – came out in 2008. Most recently she was editor for The Best Australian Poems 2016 which was published by this week by Black Inc.
The Hazards, published by UQP, was mostly written while she was living in New York and Rome, and supported by fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and a Fulbright Scholarship in New York. She has described it as an expansive and cosmopolitan meditation on the brutalities of history and the cyclical violence of the natural world.
The judges of the PM’s Literary Awards commented that in The Hazards, Holland-Batt wrote about birds and animals and plants in closely focused detail while many of her poems also responded to paintings and other artworks.
The judges continued: “The settings she depicts range over the world like a travel brochure. Yet the strength of her writing is not in its content, or its choice of subject matter, but in the rich texture of the language she uses to express ideas one might otherwise find unremarkable. She describes a toucan in the Costa Rican jungle, “in the macheted ferns and quashed nests,/ the dark tribunal of the trees”. The densely-packed echoing consonants suggest the atmosphere of a particular scene with sensual effect.
“Holland-Batt is a poet with as much feeling for the sound of words as she has for imaginative metaphor and simile. Portraying a vulture, she writes “his flawed throat/ makes nightmare music: a feline hiss,/ the monstrous grunt of sex, all of it hatched/ by a mind without pitch/ brought keeling down to perch/ at the swell of rot and bloat”. The internal rhyme convinces us that her writing has been elevated to the highest level of accomplishment, far above any of her previous achievements.”
The New Yorker published the poem ‘O California’ in its 90th anniversary edition last year and many other major international magazines and anthologies have published poems from The Hazards.
Ms Holland-Batt was awarded $40,000 by the Australia Council in New Work Grant funding in 2015 to commence work on her third collection of poems. She is also the recipient of a highly prestigious Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, an Asialink Literature Residency in Japan, and the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.
The photo can be downloaded from flickr.
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