About this episode

Johanna Bell discusses her award-winning novel 'Department of the Vanishing', exploring themes of extinction and personal loss.

Johanna Bell is an award winning author of fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her new novel Department of the Vanishing won the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript. For more than twenty years Ava has toiled away at the Department of Vanishing cataloguing species as they go extinct. The pace of the work has been increasing and as is always the case there’s never enough hands. Humanity is on the brink of a mass extinction event. Birdsong is falling silent and people didn’t even notice it disappearing. It’s Ava’s job to archive the remains, even as her personal life teeters. But in her dying mother’s confused words Ava finds something. Maybe hope. Maybe a clue to the mystery of her father, long missing, and a song that contains more than any might assume… Department of the Vanishing is a visually innovative novel that weaves a mystery around just about the saddest thing I can think of. I love the birds that visit my house and as I read I couldn’t bear to think of not hearing the Magpie’s warble, or the chittering of the Galah calling me out to give it some seed. Casting the end of birdsong as the emotional heart of the novel was effective at getting me…

People in this episode

Guest: Johanna Bell

Topics covered

• literature
• fiction
• environment
• extinction
• mystery

Keywords

• Johanna Bell
• Department of the Vanishing
• Tasmanian Literary Award
• extinction
• birds
• fiction
• mystery

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Department of the Vanishing

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