The runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ confronts spectres of the past in order to pose questions about how to live ethically in the present and about what responsibilities we bear towards the future. Drawing on a wide range of writers and thinkers as well as her grandfather’s experience of the Holocaust, Gory plots the process by which one generation’s traumatic suffering becomes another’s imaginative investment. As Gory observes, rituals of memorialisation, public and private, are beset on all sides by the snares of forgetfulness, by the temptation to ‘relegat[e] to the past what is ongoing’. Shifting between recollection and rumination, the essay refuses to yield to this temptation, proceeding through a series of fragments, ghostly demarcations of historical patterns that continue to repeat.

Sarah Gory is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne.