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.

Sarah Gory reviews 'Life with Birds: A suburban lyric' by Bronwyn Rennex

September 2022, no. 446 • 27 August 2022

Ostensibly, Life with Birds is about the author’s search for her father, a Vietnam War veteran who died when she was young and whose story she hardly knew. As I read it, though, I was reminded of a line from Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal oral history The Unwomanly Face of War (2017): ‘Women’s stories are different and about different things.’ In the end, Life with Birds is less about men ... (read more)

'Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere' by Sarah Gory

August 2022, no. 445 • 28 July 2022

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) 1. The library is comp ... (read more)

Sarah Gory reviews 'Mothertongues' by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell

June 2022, no. 443 • 23 May 2022

At the beginning of 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014), author, mother, and playwright Sarah Ruhl notes: ‘At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.’ Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell’s Mothertongues embraces, embodies even, this collapse of the boundaries between living and writing. Rathe ... (read more)