Hobart writer Johanna Bell has been awarded the University of Tasmania Prize for best unpublished work at the Tasmanian Literary Awards.
Ms Bell received the $10,000 award for the innovative verse novel Department of the Vanishing.
The story centres on the character of Ava, who spends her days in the Department’s archives rebuilding lost species from the stories, art and scientific data left behind.
It combines poetry with archival documents to explore our increasingly tenuous relationship with the natural world.
“This award has changed the way I think about myself as a writer, injecting new confidence and reminding me that there are people who enjoy the kind of books I like to write,” Ms Bell said.
“Australian writers earn an average of $18,000 a year from their writing so this award helps buy me time to work on something new and to keep taking creative risks.
“This is slightly embarrassing as a writer but I can’t find the words to express how grateful I am for this award.”
In a rare achievement, Ms Bell also received the Minister for the Arts’ Prize for Books for Young Readers and Children at the awards. With illustrator Huni Melissa Bolliger, she won for Digger Digs Down.
The University of Tasmania Prize is awarded to the best new unpublished literary work by a Tasmanian writer.
The prize’s judges praised Department of the Vanishing for its originality, ambition and confident delivery.
“Like the song of the lyrebird at the heart of the tale, Department is a collage, weaving fact, fiction, and found objects into a format – and genre – defying blend of near-future environmental dystopia and literary verse,” they said.
Johanna Bell’s poems have appeared in Overland, Griffith Review and Australian Poetry, and her children’s fiction is out with Allen & Unwin, UQP, Scholastic and Thames & Hudson. She’s the recipient of multiple literary awards and in 2020, her third book, co-created with deaf artist Dion Beasley, was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
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