Sarah Holland-Batt’s “technically brilliant and experimental” poetry collection about the death of her father, The Jaguar, has won the $25,000 top prize at the Queensland literary awards, fresh after her Stella prize win earlier this year.
The 40-year-old’s third collection, covering her father’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, his time in aged care and his death two decades later, won the premier’s award for a work of state significance on Wednesday night.
The judges called The Jaguar “a moving exploration of family dynamics, ageing, memory, desire, nature and art, combined with a passionate rage about our care of our elders. It is a hopeful and optimistic call for change.
“Technically brilliant and experimental, this collection is intelligent, accessible, nuanced and finely balanced.”
Holland-Batt is an outspoken advocate for aged care reform, making national headlines in 2019 when she gave evidence at the aged care royal commission, detailing the neglect and abuse her father suffered in a Queensland nursing home.
On Wednesday the poet, who was born in Southport and is now professor of creative writing and literary studies at the Queensland University of Technology, said she was “super thrilled” to win.
“It is quite astonishing for a poetry book to be recognised as having state significance,” she said. “I have always looked up to so many Queensland poets like David Malouf, Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Queensland has a very rich tradition of amazing poets and it is lovely to think that my work is being recognised as important to the state.”
The awards were established in 2015, after the Queensland premier’s literary awards were abolished by the then premier Campbell Newman. The prizes are now administered by the State Library of Queensland.
The $238,500 prize pool is shared across 12 categories spanning fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and published and unpublished work.
Also among this year’s winners is Alexis Wright, who won the $15,000 fiction category for her epic novel Praiseworthy. The Waanyi author previously won the fiction category of the QPLAs for Carpentaria in 2007 and the nonfiction category of the QLAs for Tracker in 2018.
Wright said she “was really pleased” by her win. “I come from Queensland and the Queensland literary awards mean a great deal to me.”
Referring to her 700-page novel, Wright said: “The prize is really being able to work on a book like that and put the time and thought and everything [in] to write a book like that – to be able to finish it is reward enough.”
Debut author Debra Dank won the $15,000 nonfiction prize for We Come With This Place, described in the Guardian as “a jewel of a book” that “belongs alongside iconic desert memoirs”. In May, Dank won a record four categories and $85,000 at the New South Wales premier’s literary awards, including book of the year.
Hailing from Gudanji and Wakaja country in far-west Queensland, Dank told the Guardian she was “absolutely thrilled”.
“I remain grateful to those people who continue to engage with this book and of course offer my congratulations to all nominees,” she said.
“The simple beauty of the language, the wrenching emotional power of the story and its deep insights make this book a classic,” the QLA judges said of We Come With This Place.
Other winners on Wednesday include Katrina Nannestad, who won the $15,000 children’s book award for her novel Waiting for the Storks; and Biffy James, who won the $15,000 young adult prize for Completely Normal (and Other Lies).
Katerina Gibson’s Women I Know won the $15,000 short stories category, while poet Lionel Fogarty won the poetry prize for Harvest Lingo. Fellow poet Maria van Neerven won the David Unaipon award for emerging First Nations writers with her poetry manuscript To Give Them a Voice, winning $15,000 and a publishing deal with University of Queensland Press.
Six of this year’s winning authors across the 12 categories are First Nations writers.
