Sarah Holland-Batt
Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. She is presently a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow.
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) (New York University), Master of Philosophy English (Writing) (University of Queensland), BArts Hons Class I (Literary Studies) (University of Queensland)
Sarah Holland-Batt is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at QUT, and an award-winning poet, editor and critic. Educated at New York University and the University of Queensland, she is the recipient of a 2016 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature residency in Japan, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. In 2016, she was awarded the CHASS Australia Prize for Future Leader in the Humanities.
Her first book, Aria (UQP, 2008) was the recipient of a number of national literary awards, including the Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry, the Arts A.C.T. Judith Wright Poetry Prize and the F.A.W. Anne Elder Award, and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards for Poetry. Aria was also commended in The Age newspaper’s 2009 Poetry Book of the Year prize, and was a set text on the VCE Literature curriculum from 2011-2014. Her second book, The Hazards (UQP, 2015) won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, the AFAL John Bray Memorial Prize, the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, and the Queensland Literary Awards, and named as a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. Her poems have been widely published in Australian and international literary journals and anthologies and have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Bahasa Indonesian and Japanese; a Spanish translation of The Hazards is forthcoming with Vaso Roto (Spain and Mexico) in early 2018.
Holland-Batt was editor of Black Inc’s The Best Australian Poems 2017 and The Best Australian Poems 2016, and also works as the Poetry Editor of Island, one of Australia’s leading literary journals, and as an advisor to many industry bodies. She writes poetry, fiction, and criticism, and researches in the area of contemporary Australian and American poetics, with a particular interests in the lyric poem, ekphrasis and visual poetics, gender and feminist theory.
Photo by Juno Gemes.