Ms sarah holland-batt

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2010 Fulbright Postgraduate Alumni (WG Walker) Scholarship

Media Profile

“Australian poetry and American poetry speak, albeit from radically different positions, to many common preoccupations: the vastness of the landscape; anxieties of the New World and of post/coloniality; and the shared experience of white Australian and American poets being simultaneously empowered in their home culture but on the back foot in relation to Old World cultures.”

Ms Sarah Holland-Batt, a poet, critic, and lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology in Literary Studies and Creative Writing, has received a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship to study a Master of Fine Arts in poetry at New York University for two years. She is one of two winners of the Postgraduate Alumni (WG Walker) Alumni Scholarship, which is granted to the highest ranked Australian postgraduate applicant and funded through donations by Fulbright Alumni.

Sarah is already a published author in the field of poetry, and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the prestigious Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome and an Asialink Literature Residency in Japan. Her debut collection, Aria (UQP), was awarded the Australian Capital Territory Judith Wright Prize, the FAW Anne Elder Award, the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Hewett Fellowship, and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards.

During her Fulbright, Sarah will write a book-length sequence of lyric poems, Quartet, which reworks Dante’s account of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno into a series of interwoven dramatic monologues. She intends to combine musical forms and historical voices to explore one of the lyric poem’s most haunting effects: its ability to transcend time and to call up an endlessly recurring present through the intimacy of its address.

“Thematically, the sequence will unfold not only the central paradox facing the two lovers – that memory is, as Dante suggests, both their ‘greatest sadness’ and the only trace of their past happiness – but also the nature of eros, and its necessary proximity to violence and death,” Sarah said.

She will be supervised at New York University by preeminent poet Anne Carson, whose work on adopting and rendering musical forms in language has long influenced Sarah’s own writing. Undertaking this sustained mentorship and participating in NYU’s rigorous seminar, masterclass and reading program will give Sarah the opportunity to build links and further understanding between the American and Australian poetic traditions.

Sarah has a BA with first class Honours in Literary Studies and a Masters of Philosophy in English from the University of Queensland. In addition to her academic work and writing, she enjoys travel, music, classical piano, opera and photography.