Sarah Holland-Batt

The Hazards, Holland-Batt's second volume, was praised as "a virtuoso performance" by The Sydney Morning Herald, and "an absolute gem of a collection overspilling with poems of compelling urgency and dazzling accomplishment" by The Australian. Writing in Australian Book Review, Cassandra Atherton commented on Holland-Batt's "stark and sumptuous lyricism" and described The Hazards as "a thrilling psycho-geographical evocation of physical and internal landscapes." The judges of the Western Australian Premier's Book Prize observed that The Hazards is marked by "a kind of tough lyricism and an exacting use of language [that] makes for dramatic, assertive poetry" that imagines, "often through surprising metaphors, the ‘real and imagined hazards’ of living.". Geoff Page, writing in The Australian, likewise noted Holland-Batt's facility with metaphor: "The Hazards is dense with metaphorical energy...in the service of substantial moral and psychological insights."

Holland-Batt is the author of two award-winning volumes of poetry, Aria and The Hazards, and the editor of two anthologies of contemporary Australian poetry, and is the editor of Black Inc's The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017.. Aria, Holland-Batt's first book, received the 2007 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, and was subsequently published by the University of Queensland Press in 2008. Aria subsequently won the Anne Elder Award and the Judith Wright Prize, and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Mary Gilmore Prize.

Holland-Batt is the recipient of international fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, a Hawthornden Castle residency, and an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. Her poems have appeared in numerous international newspapers, periodicals and magazines, including The New Yorker and Poetry, among others, and have been widely anthologised. From 2016-2018, she was awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship from the Myer Foundation, the first poet to ever receive the honour.

The Hazards, Holland-Batt's second volume, was published in 2015, and went on to win Australia's foremost prize for poetry, the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, in 2016. The Hazards was also shortlisted for numerous other prestigious awards, including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards Poetry Prize, and was named as a book of the year in The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Australian Book Review.

Holland-Batt has served as a judge of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award, and the Australian Book Review's Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize,. From 2014-2019, she was the poetry editor of Island Magazine. She is presently a Director of Australian Book Review.

Sarah Holland-Batt (born 1982) is a contemporary Australian poet, critic and academic.