Patrick Holland (author)

Patrick Holland is an Australian novelist and short story writer who grew up in outback Australia doing horse work for local station owners. He is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.

His novel, The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge, 2010), tells the story of a band of young disenfranchised horse thieves and the young sister of one of them. It was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for the Age Book of the year. The novel employs a prose technique based on Arvo Pärt's tintinnabuli technique of musical composition and Biblical dirges.

His short story collection, The Source of the Sound (Salt, 2010), won Salt Publishing's 2010 Scott Prize.

The Darkest Little Room (Transit Lounge, 2012), is a literary thriller set in Ho Chi Minh City. The novel concerns human trafficking.

Navigatio (Transit Lounge, 2014) is a novelistic meditation on the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (or The Journey of St Brendan (circa AD 900)), which assumes the form of a semi-ordered collection of Medieval manuscripts.

One (Transit Lounge, 2016) is a novel that imagines the final days of the Kenniff gang, Australia's last bushrangers, on their escapades in Western Queensland. The novel was longlisted for the 2018 International Dublin Literary Award.

Holland's writing is informed by Greek Orthodoxy, to which faith he is a convert, and his experiences working in Asia and outback Australia.[1] He is a founding member of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association and judge of the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He has described his writing style as minimalist, and also 'ambient' with reference to Japanese literature, in particular the works of Yasunari Kawabata and Yuki Kurita.[2]

He attained his PhD at Queensland University of Technology, researching non-place, sacred place and Japanese religio-aesthetics.