Sarah Holland-Batt

Professor Sarah Holland-Batt FAHA FQA is an award-winning poet, editor and critic, and Head of the Creative Writing discipline at UTS. Among them, her books have received the Stella Prize, the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, the Queensland Premier's Prize for State Significance, the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, the H.T. Priestly Medal and other honours. Educated at New York University and the University of Queensland, she is the recipient of a 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. In 2016, she was awarded the CHASS Australia Prize for Future Leader in the Humanities, and she has recently been recognised as an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of 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. The Hazards is presently taught on the VCE Literature curriculum. Her third book of poems, The Jaguar, was published in 2022, won an array of national awards including the Stella Prize, was named The Australian's Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the international Griffin Prize and other awards. Her most recent book was the UK publication of her Selected Poems by Bloodaxe Books in 2024. 

Holland-Batt's 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, Los Peligros, was published with Vaso Roto (Spain and Mexico) in 2018, and a translation of The Jaguar in 2024. Holland-Batt was editor of Black Inc's The Best Australian Poems 2017 and The Best Australian Poems 2016, and the poetry editor of Island, one of Australia's leading literary journals, from 2014-2019. She researches in the area of contemporary Australian and American poetics, with particular interests in the lyric poem; ekphrasis, violence and the abject; and literary representations of ageing, death and aged care.

As a critic, she writes for publications including The Monthly and Australian Book Review, and she also contributes commentary, reportage and analysis on aged care issues for media outlets including ABC News, Q&A, 7:30, The Project, The Guardian, The Australian, Inside Story, Radio National and other forums. In 2020, supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Copyright Agency, she was appointed as the Poet's Voice columnist at The Australian; a collection of the first 50 of her columns, Fishing For Lightning: The Spark of Poetry, was published by UQP in 2021. Holland-Batt was the first poet to be appointed as the Judy Harris Writer in Residence 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.

She serves in key governance roles across the cultural sector, and is presently Chair of Australian Book Review, a member of the National Library of Australia Council, Writing Australia's inaugural Council, and the Sidney Myer Fund's Arts & Culture Committee, and is an advisor to many literary bodies.