Hazard

• 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.