Shortlisted for the 2024 Stella Prize
Hayley Singer – Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead
Nonfiction · Upswell Publishing
About the Book
Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on Earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. Has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote? Abandon Every Hope is a lament, a deranged encyclopedia and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age? Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profit-driven death. In her compelling and poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm: of the horror we make on Earth. Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?
“Experimental and jostling in its use of poetic, lyric, academic and reflective writing styles, this book grapples with the industrial meat complex.”
– 2024 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Hayley Singer
Hayley Singer writes essays about literature and ecologies, queer embodiment and activism, multispecies in/justices and on reading and writing as worlds end and begin again. Her writing has been published in Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, The Monthly, Cordite Poetry Review, and Writing from Below. She teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne. This is her first book.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Singer writes with a magnificent intensity, moving between different registers in order to bear witness to the pain and suffering of the slaughterhouse.” Stephanie King, Readings
“Abandon Every Hope takes the form of a thanatography – an attempt to write death – which Hayley Singer describes as having a “nearness to biography.” Fiona Wright, The Saturday Paper
“A quietly ambitious book about suffering.” Ben Brooker, Australian Book Review
“Singer’s skill likes in controlling the level of discomfort in the essays to the point where you feel it as a reader but don’t put the book down for a breath of fresh air or a long stare out the window, reflecting on your own part in all this.” Jasper Linde, The Canberra Times
Judges’ Report
Singer refuses to comply with the blasé orthodoxy of either moral shrillness or expedient looking away.
Few of us will grapple with a thanatography (an attempt to write death), few of us will do so with the brutal, confronting compassion that Singer does in Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead. Experimental and jostling in its use of poetic, lyric, academic and reflective writing styles, this book grapples with the industrial meat complex, from slaughterhouses to cannibalism and beyond.
These fragmentary but, ultimately, coherent essays insert themselves into consciousness, long after the time required for their reading. Notwithstanding the gruesome, and sometimes gruelling, subject matter, this is a work that rewards bearing witness, a book where attention and looking – looking and looking and not looking away – offers the reader the opportunity for transformation and agency and, perhaps oxymoronically, hope.
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