UQP acquires new book from the 2023 Stella Prize winner, Sarah Holland-Batt

UQP is delighted to announce that we have acquired ANZ rights to Sarah Holland-Batt’s new book of creative nonfiction from Clare Forster at Curtis Brown. The as-yet untitled work follows her Stella Prize-winning poetry collection, The Jaguar, where many poems poignantly and piercingly reflect on her father’s decline and death from Parkinson’s Disease. Her new book turns to the strange and disturbing phenomenon of personality transformations that can accompany neurological illnesses such as Parkinson’s, and considers the question of what happens when those we love become other to us.

Parkinson’s Disease is often misunderstood as solely affecting motor abilities but, in Sarah’s father’s case, it also involved significant changes in personality, including obsessiveness, grandiosity and megalomania, rendering him unrecognisable at times, particularly after neurosurgery to implant a Deep Brain Stimulator device. These personality changes led to certain aspects of her father disappearing, seemingly for good, but also the resurfacing of difficult memories and secrets from his childhood. While her father was revisiting his past, he was also inventing an alternate future: a fantasy life that threatened to subsume his sense of reality and his connections with his family. This brave, moving work, exploring the complexities of personality, memory, identity, and the discomfiting frontiers of transhumanism, will be published in early 2025.

Sarah Holland-Batt says:

‘In my new work of creative nonfiction, I consider the unsettling question of what a personality is, if it can be changed as profoundly and completely as my father’s was after his brain surgery for Parkinson’s Disease. After the implantation of his Deep Brain Stimulator, my father was transformed from a brilliant and compassionate man into someone who felt like a stranger at times – one whose intelligence was channelled into an intense and destructive competitiveness that threatened my relationship with him. Ever since, I have been fascinated by how the smallest changes in brain chemistry can sweep away the person we thought we knew, and replace them with someone unrecognisable.

‘My book will also delve into the idea of transhumanism, and what it means to become part-human, part-machine. I am deeply interested in the question of who we are when we are in cognitive decline, and what it means to become other to ourselves. While these are difficult questions to contemplate, they seem to me central to the task of reconciling our mortal lives, and what Simone de Beauvoir wryly called our “coming of age”.’

Aviva Tuffield says:

‘Sarah Holland-Batt is rightly recognised as one of this country’s best poets, and with this new book she brings her superlative talents to creative nonfiction writing. She deploys her fierce, analytical intelligence and remarkable facility with language to capture – and distil – profound, personal experiences on the page. Her forensic examination of her relationship with her father as his Parkinson’s takes hold, along with his dramatic personality shifts, is, by turns, fascinating, unexpected and devastating, and touches on questions important to us all: how do our relationships to ourselves and to our loved ones change over time? And how can we deal better with ageing and illness in a society that is uncomfortable with both?’

About Sarah Holland-Batt
Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor and critic, and a Professor of Creative Writing at QUT. Her first book, Aria (UQP, 2008), was the recipient of a number of national literary awards, and her second book, The Hazards (UQP, 2015), won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her most recent collection is The Jaguar, which won the 2023 Stella Prize, and The Australian 2022 Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the prestigious international Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize.

Sarah is the recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature residency in Japan, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She has recently been the Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre.

For more information please contact Jean Smith on jean.smith@uqp.com.au or 07 3365 2606