Sarah Holland-Batt has won the $60,000 Stella Prize for her intimate and affecting poetry collection The Jaguar, about her relationship with her late father, who suffered from Parkinson's disease.
The judges' report described the collection, Holland-Batt's third, as "accessible, lyrical and wise", and the poems about the poet and her father as "tender [and] memorable".
"[They] capture grief and loss and love through unforgettable imagery, often blended with humour."
Chair of the judging panel, author Alice Pung, wrote that Holland-Batt's book "unflinchingly observes the complex emotions of caring for loved ones, contending with our own mortality and above all – continuing to live".
In a statement responding to her win, Holland-Batt said: "I wrote this book during an intensely challenging period, as my father was dying, and just after. 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."
She tells ABC Arts: "It's really surreal and incredibly exciting and a bit astonishing [to win]."
"It feels very special to be recognised by an organisation that I think has done a lot for women writers, and a lot for Australian literature, to shift the culture."
This is the second year in a row that the prize for women and non-binary writers has been won by a work of poetry (following Evelyn Araluen's debut Dropbear), after a broadening of the prize's remit in 2022.
A monumental subject
Holland-Batt didn't feel ready to write the poems about her father until after he died:"It felt like a subject that was too monumental to approach," she told ABC Arts.
"It has taken me 20 years to realise that his experiences with Parkinson's, which were poignant and painful and difficult at times, could be a subject for poetry."
The collection is dedicated to her father, who died in March 2020, and she writes in the acknowledgements: "[His] brilliance and kindness were larger than life, and are now larger than death".
Holland-Batt says she wanted to "write about a space that I hadn't seen written about a lot, which is essentially end of life, cognitive decline, caregiving and the relationship that I had with an ageing parent".
"[I was contemplating] what happens when someone you love becomes someone else, and observing those moments of frailty in old age, those moments of vulnerability," she says.
But it was with some trepidation that she released The Jaguar, last year: "I wasn't sure that it would be a book that many people would want to read."
Once Holland-Batt started talking about the book at writers' festivals and in the media, she saw how many people had connected with the work, as they shared their experiences with her.
"I've realised just how many people have those stories and how few outlets people feel they have to share them," she says.
"People are interested in sharing and speaking about that act of caregiving — about the intimacy of it, about the love that's involved in it, [and] the privilege that is caring for an older person in a state of vulnerability."
Capturing moments of wonder
The poems in The Jaguar are vivid with detail and understated humour. In a poem titled Nessun Dorma, Holland-Batt chronicles her father's later life fascination with Pavarotti; elsewhere, she describes his fixation with Winston Churchill (Empires of Mind), and his belief, while living in a nursing home, that he would fly the family first-class to Brazil (Brazil).
The titular poem describes her father's purchase of an emerald-green sports car, shortly after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. He modified the car until it no longer worked:
"[I]t sat like a carcass
in the garage, like a headstone, like a coffin –
but it's no symbol or metaphor. I can't make anything of it."
Many of the poems draw upon the imagery of the natural world, including a giant koi in a pond (My Father as a Giant Koi), the mountain range where her father suffered a stroke (Pikes Peak), and the Queensland landscape (Time Remaining).
In My Father as a Giant Koi, Holland-Batt describes her father in a nursing home as if he is "at the bottom of a pond / perfecting the art of the circle":
"He surfaces
three times a day when the nurse brings
a tray – cold blanched carrot and beef,
whitesauce fillet of whiting, pound cake."
The poet explains: "I was hoping that the poems would consider the human as animal and open up a world that is not just sanitised, white, dead spaces of hospitals, but also the imaginative realm in which we are our animals selves as we die."
In Time Remaining, Holland-Batt quotes her father the day before he died: "I'm beginning to wonder," he says.
"I thought that was such a beautiful encapsulation of what it is to contemplate death: It is this astonishing, awe-inspiring frontier that we all at some point will have to approach and deal with. But it is also a source of doubt and anxiety and uncertainty," she reflects.
The poet says she deliberately infused the collection with a sense of beauty and wonder: "I hope the poems invite people to consider that there may be some beauty at the end of life, [and] that there's no point in pretending that it doesn't happen."
"Death is part of living."
Juggling caregiving and creative work
When the Stella Prize was created in 2013, it set out to reduce the barriers to women's participation in literary life.
One of those barriers is caregiving and domestic responsibilities. Journalist Jess HIll, who won in 2020, told ABC Arts that writing while caring for a newborn required "military-esque strategies".
Holland-Batt too speaks about the way she juggled caring for her father with her creative practice, and says she continues to care for a close family member.
"We know that caregiving — whether it's childcare, aged care, care for a partner — is overwhelmingly done by women. And it is mostly unacknowledged in our society," she says.
"Women are asked to sustain the illusion that they can do everything: that they can work full-time and support themselves economically; that they can make art somehow in the spaces between; and that they do the bulk of caregiving."
During the early years of her father's illness, Holland-Batt's caregiving responsibilities were few, but they increased after his condition worsened and he was moved into aged care, where he was subjected to elder abuse.
She became an advocate for him, and for better aged care generally, which led her to testify at the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety in 2019.
It is difficult, she says, to find the time, energy and mental space to write – especially when you are caring for someone with acute needs.
"It was, at times, enormously difficult to maintain any form of writing practice, and to fulfil my working obligations, and to feel like I was doing enough. I think women are often trapped in that space," she says.
"I would like to see a change in the way culturally, societally, we value and recognise caregiving and make it visible."
How the Stella is changing the scene
When Holland-Batt started publishing poetry in the mid-00s, the Australian scene was dominated by men, including figureheads such as Les Murray, Robert Adamson and John Tranter.
"These were the names that you entered into the literary ecosystem looking at," she says.
"That has shifted I think quite profoundly just as a function of women publishing more poetry books, and the reception of women's writing shifting over time."
Holland-Batt bested Murray and Adamson for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry for her second collection, The Hazards, in 2016 – a win that was reflective of how the literary landscape had changed.
She credits the Stella for a larger shift in the spirit of the Australian literary community – to one of "generosity, of exchange, of mutual support".
"We like to think that literature is always like that, but I think the Stella has done a lot to push that forward," she says.
The Jaguar is out now through University of Queensland Press.
