QUT’s Professor Sarah Holland-Batt, who is an advocate for aged care reform, has been awarded the 2023 Stella Prize for her poetry collection The Jaguar.
Professor Holland-Batt was announced the winner of the $60,000 prize last night for her collection of poems she wrote as she observed the devastation of her father’s worsening Parkinson’s Disease.
In awarding the prize, the 2023 Stella judging panel said The Jaguar: “investigates the body as a site of both pleasure and frailty”.
An internationally renowned, award-winning poet, editor, and critic, Professor Holland-Batt won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2016 for her second book of poetry The Hazards. The Jaguar was named The Australian’s Book of the Year for 2022
Of winning this year’s prize, Professor Holland-Batt described it as “both an indescribable joy and a deep honour.
“I wrote this book during an intensely challenging period, as my father was dying, and just after,” Professor Holland-Batt said.
“It was the friendship, generosity, and camaraderie of women that not only saw me through this difficult time, but that has been the sustaining armature of my writing life.
“So it’s only right that I acknowledge all the women – publishers, editors, mentors, fellow writers, friends – who have supported and championed my work over the years; I simply wouldn’t be here without them.
“I’m thrilled to enter into the company of the extraordinary writers who have received the Stella, and so grateful for what this prize has done to transform the books and voices we value in Australian literature.”
In awarding the prize, 2023 Stella Prize Chair of Judges Alice Pung said Professor Holland-Batt “writes about death as tenderly as we’ve ever read about birth.”
“She focuses on the pedestrian details of hospitals and aged care facilities, enabling us to see these institutions as distinct universes teeming with life and love,” Ms Pung said.
“Her imagery is unexpected and unforgettable, and often blended with humour. This is a book that cuts through to the core of what it means to descend into frailty, old age, and death. It unflinchingly observes the complex emotions of caring for loved ones, contending with our own mortality and above all – continuing to live.”
In 2021, Professor Holland-Batt became the first poet appointed as the Judy Harris Writer in Residence Fellowship at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, an honour offered annually to a distinguished Australian writer whose work offers a literary perspective on health and chronic disease.
