Excellence in Tasmania’s creative and academic endeavours honoured in memory of Dr Erica Bell

Adam Ousten

Two outstanding Tasmanians recognised for excellence in medical research and literature have been awarded the state’s largest cash prizes of their kind, with the presentation of the inaugural Erica Bell Foundation Awards in Hobart today.

The Erica Bell Foundation was established earlier this year to celebrate excellence in literature and medical research in Tasmania, by awarding a total of $23,000 to emerging novelists and first-time, first authors of medical research publications.

Maureen Davey won the Erica Bell Foundation Medical Research Award for her publication ‘Tasmanian Aborigines step-up to health: evaluation of a cardiopulmonary rehabilitation and secondary prevention program’.

Ms Davey’s research evaluated the uptake and effectiveness of a cardiovascular and pulmonary rehabilitation program, specifically designed and provided to the Aboriginal community. This service was provided by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre for people with diagnosed chronic heart or respiratory disease as well as those at high risk.

The Erica Bell Foundation Literature Award was won by Adam Ouston for ‘The Party’. Mr Ouston has a plethora of experience in bringing literature to the wider Tasmanian public, through several years of teaching, judging writing awards, conducting writing seminars for young and emerging Tasmanian writers as well as working as a bookseller at Fullers Bookshop. Mr Ouston’s work questions Australian identity through the protagonist Vivian, feeling at odds with the nation that is her home. These ideas are examined throughout the novel in extraordinary breadth and ambition.

Erica Bell Foundation founder and Erica’s husband, Dr Bastian Seidel, said the awards represented the highest annual awards of their kind in Tasmania, with each winner receiving $10,000, each runner-up receiving $1,000, and the second runners-up receiving $500.

“I created the Erica Bell Foundation to both honour and recognise excellence in the two disciplines in which Erica was passionate about and excelled in – academia and literature,” Dr Seidel said.
“Erica published over 100 academic research papers and five books during her 10 years at the University of Tasmania, as well as publishing two historical novels.

“She also worked at the cutting edge of medical research and was deeply committed to her academic work and to Tasmania. She was working as an Associate Professor at the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre at the University of Tasmania at the time of her passing, aged 52.”

The Erica Bell Foundation is supported in-kind by the University of Tasmania’s Faculty of Health and the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre.

Tasmanian Writers’ Centre Director Chris Gallagher said the winners’ work was impressively evocative and imaginative and she was delighted by the overall standard of entries, making tough work for the judges.

“The Erica Bell Foundation Literature Award is a wonderful initiative and offers much needed incentive for writers to finish and polish their work,” Ms Gallagher said.

“All three stories from our winners and runners-up, The Party, The Shape of Water and The Marsupial Almanac, are sure to find interested publishers.

“This prize really proves Tasmania punches above its weight in the literature world and what we need now is to get these wonderful writers published and their names out into the open.”

The awards were presented this morning at the Hobart Function and Convention Centre, with over 100 people attending the awards breakfast.

The awards ceremony will be held on the first Friday of December each year.

For more information about the Erica Bell Foundation or award winners please visit www.ericabellfoundation.org or email info@ericabellfoundation.org

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