Stella Prize

Sarah Holland-Batt wins the 2023 Stella Prize with a powerful look at death and ageing

Retrieved on: 
金曜日, 4月 28, 2023
XJ, Poetry, Travel, Stella, Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, Life, Hazard, Politics, Safety, Rage, Policy, Taboo, Humour, Silk, Tenderness, Metaphor, Emotion, Stella Prize, Thought, Book, Hospital, Grief, Royal commission, Collection, Frailty, Nursing, Love, Sarah Holland-Batt, First Nations, Diagnosis, Mortality, Ageing, Death, The Hazards, Entertainment, Pharmaceutical industry

Acclaimed poet Sarah Holland-Batt has won the 2023 Stella Prize for her powerful and elegiac collection of poetry, The Jaguar.

Key Points: 
  • Acclaimed poet Sarah Holland-Batt has won the 2023 Stella Prize for her powerful and elegiac collection of poetry, The Jaguar.
  • Poetry was excluded from the Stella Prize until 2022.

The full power of poetic language

    • The Jaguar brings the full power of poetic language to bear on experiences often pushed to the edges of public life.
    • The most stunning poems in the collection focus on the experience of ageing, illness and death – in ways that are both deeply compassionate and fierce.
    • Stella Prize chair Alice Pung says of the book:
      In The Jaguar, Sarah Holland-Batt writes about death as tenderly as we’ve ever read about birth.
    • Read more:
      First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen wins the 2022 Stella Prize with a 'wild ride' skewering colonial mythologies

The politics of bearing witness

    • Holland-Batt has spoken publicly about the neglect of aged care funding and policy in this country.
    • She made a submission to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety about the abuse and neglect her father suffered in aged care.
    • “Our cultural denial of death also underwrites many of our failures in aged care.” The politics of this collection reside in the act of bearing witness.
    • Read more:
      How to complain about aged care and get the result you want

Imaginative flight

    • A good example of these shifts is in the ways the jaguar of the collection’s title emerges throughout the collection.
    • I can’t make anything of it.” The jaguar of this poem also demonstrates Holland-Batt’s imaginative and linguistic power: it is at once an object of this world and a link to other understandings of the relationship between the human and the animal, especially at death.
    • With a combination of ruthlessness and tenderness, clear-eyed witness and imaginative flight, this is a poet who knows exactly what she is doing.

Stella Prize shortlist 2023: your guide to 6 gripping, courageous books

Retrieved on: 
水曜日, 4月 26, 2023
Review, Vedas, Male, Biography, Travel, Journalism, Violence, Life, Poetry, Face, Friends, Paint, Culture, Parent, Hydra, Taboo, Stella Prize, Woman, Anger, Grandparent, Falls, History, Defiant, Mother, Portrait, Dementia, Stella, Grief, City, FUCK, Grills, Collection, Restaurant, Nursing, Love, Fat body, Trauma, Courage, Death, Family, Memory, Book, Social media, Female, Jewellery, Film industry, Interior design, Entertainment

At its outset, in 2013, it drew attention to the lack of women on prize shortlists.

Key Points: 
  • At its outset, in 2013, it drew attention to the lack of women on prize shortlists.
  • Over time, it appears to have shifted prize culture in this county to the point that it seems unlikely that we’ll see a “sausagefest” shortlist again any time soon.
  • This year’s shortlist is no exception, for the most part steering away from established authors and major presses.

We Come With This Place by Debra Dank

    • Here, Debra Dank pulls the reader close and shares stories not only about her childhood, but also her ancestors and her children.
    • I emerged from this book grateful to Dank for being willing to share it with us as readers.

big beautiful female theory by Eloise Grills

    • This is a work of memoir, theory, art history and visual essay, in which Eloise Grills tackles the big question of how women are impacted by how their bodies are seen by others.
    • Read more:
      Big beautiful females and familiar dystopias: new graphic nonfiction interrogates 21st-century life

The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt

    • Sarah Holland-Batt is the most established author on this year’s shortlist.
    • The Jaguar, her third book, is a powerful collection of poetry.

Hydra by Adriane Howell

    • In this evocatively spooky place she falls in thrall to a mysterious creature that may or may not be an urban myth.
    • I love this novel’s attention to the world of work and its expectations, and the complexities of female friendship.
    • Hydra is a new take on the gothic representation of a place with a layered history.

Indelible City by Louisa Lim

    • Louisa Lim uses a combination of memoir, biography and historical research to tell a layered story about Hong Kong’s history and present.
    • Indelible City ends up eschewing the possibility of journalistic detachment in the face of seeing a vibrant city become subject to an authoritarian regime.
    • Read more:
      Louisa Lim's 'outstanding' portrait of a dispossessed, defiant Hong Kong is the activist journalism we need

Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston

    • The figure of Veda Gray, the mother of this novel’s title, draws from many female artists across history who have produced art in the face of a social structure that makes it very difficult to do so.
    • In her anger, Harwood published a sonnet that said, when read acrostically: FUCK ALL EDITORS.
    • She is joined in an evocatively detailed world of restaurants and art in 1960s Melbourne by a cast of other women artists whose brilliance finds varied paths to light.