Calibre Prize

Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere

Runner-up in ABR’s 2022 Calibre Essay Prize

by Sarah Gory •

August 2022, no. 445

Calibre Prize

Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere

Runner-up in ABR’s 2022 Calibre Essay Prize

by Sarah Gory •

August 2022, no. 445

The author’s grandfather, Mark Gory (right), with his parents, both of whom were killed during World War II (photograph supplied)

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more
and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of
stereometry, between which the living and the dead can
move back and forth as they like.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)

The library is comprised of every book that does and could exist. Every possible combination of characters has been written and bound and placed in the library, which is also the universe. ‘The certitude that everything has been written [even] the minutely detailed history of the future […] turns us into phantoms.’¹

Somewhere in the library is a description of the sound my grandfather made when he fell face first onto the carpet, dying instantly. When my Buba came in to investigate the noise her first thought was, Shit – I just got the carpet cleaned.

At least, that’s how she tells it later.

Sarah Gory

Sarah Gory is a writer, editor and researcher. She has worked in leadership positions in the arts for the past two decades, most recently as Managing Editor of un Projects. Sarah’s creative non-fiction and art criticism has appeared in various Australian journals and magazines, including Meanjin, un Magazine, and The Lifted Brow. Her short story ‘Leaving’ was shortlisted in the 2019 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and in 2021 she co-edited the AMBLE issue of Cordite Poetry Review with Elena Gomez. She is also the co-publisher of imprint Common Room, with Paul Mylecharane. Sarah is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and lives in Naarm/Melbourne with her family.

Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ was runner-up in the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize.