Holland-Batt wins 2023 Stella Prize for ‘The Jaguar’

Sarah Holland-Batt has won the 2023 Stella Prize, worth $60,000, for The Jaguar (UQP).

It’s the second time a poetry collection has won the award, following Evelyn Araluen’s win last year for her collection Dropbear (UQP), which came after the Stella Prize expanded its eligibility rules to include single-authored poetry collections.

Holland-Batt wrote The Jaguar as she observed the devastation of her father’s worsening Parkinson’s disease, resulting in a ‘remarkable’ collection that the Stella Prize judges said ‘investigates the body as a site of both pleasure and frailty’.

‘In The Jaguar, Sarah Holland-Batt writes about death as tenderly as we’ve ever read about birth,’ said judging panel chair Alice Pung. ‘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. 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.’

Holland-Batt said she wrote The Jaguar during ‘an intensely challenging period’, and that 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,’ Holland-Batt said. ‘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.’

The Jaguar was chosen as winner from a shortlist of six and a longlist of twelve.

For more information about this year’s winner and shortlist, see the Stella website.

Category: Awards Local news