English Research Seminar -- Poetry reading by Sarah Holland-Batt and Niall Campbell

Join the School of English for a reading by two award-winning poets from their recent collections.

Sarah Holland-Batt is an Australian poet, editor, and critic. Her three volumes of poetry — Aria, The Hazards, and The Jaguar — have each received major Australian literary awards, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and the Stella Prize. Her column on contemporary Australian poetry for The Australian newspaper was subsequently collected and published as Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry. Other honours include the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

“Holland-Batt is one of the best poets writing not only in Australia but anywhere in the world in English. This is an art of necessity, of belief, and of artisan-like commitment.” — John Kinsella

Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His new collection, The Island in the Sound, was published in September of this year. He is editor of Poetry London, and lives in Fife.

“The poems in the book place his Hebridean homeland in an ever-shifting mosaic of tidal gifts, memories, folklore, conversations and people. Always there is an awareness of the sea that surrounds, that change is constant, and that there is no going back.” — The Scotsman, Poem of the Week, on ‘The Island in the Sound.'