Hayley Campbell
Writer
Books
Books
Hayley Campbell has written for BuzzFeed, WIRED, Empire, VICE/VICE Sports, New Statesman, McSweeney’s, The Comics Journal, The Guardian, GQ, Esquire, and the Observer Magazine. As Features Writer at BuzzFeed, her work was read by millions, most notably her piece about the Doves Type, a story about Victorian mad men, betrayal and some lead type at the bottom of the Thames. In 2014, her book The Art of Neil Gaiman — a fully authorised, lavishly illustrated biography of Gaiman and his work — was published by Harper Design. She hosts the Unpopped podcast for the BBC. She lives in Highgate, London, near the cemetery.
Current publication:
ALL THE LIVING AND THE DEAD - Raven Books (Bloomsbury, UK) March 2022 and St Martin's Press, 16th August 2022.
Detectives, morticians, crime scene cleaners, embalmers and executioners are all part of a "highly unusual" and very select group of people who deal with death and the dying every day and the book ALL THE LIVING AND THE DEAD by journalist Hayley Campbell will explore what drew them to these professions and how has it changed them. Campbell will also investigate her own fascination and fear of death through her encounters with a series of extraordinary people.
Praise:
Irish Times Book of the Year 2022 - ‘I was blown away by Hayley Campbell’s All the Living and the Dead, her hands-on reportage of professions in the death industry.’
'I have never read a book like this one. Ms. Campbell's... answers questions I never thought to ask... [It is] more than a written narrative, it is a map across uneven and untraveled land. Her story lingers the way a mortuary’s perfume (“slightly-off chicken, raw, still cold”) sticks to the roof of your mouth. This is a book you will carry with you... There are moments of grisly, if fascinating, reality.. At times humorous and always informative, this humanity sets “All the Living and the Dead” apart' - Wall Street Journal Review
'It's not at all what i was expecting. It's an extraordinary journey, through scenes and characters so chilling they have their own crystalline beauty. The writing is finely felt and full of life, Campbell always finding a way to look through horror, to see humanity. So many of the images in it are heart-stopping- and by the end I was surprised to find myself sobbing. It's superb.' - Rhik Samadder
‘A book about corpses might seem like a downer. Worse, the subject risks creating melodrama or glib horror out of grief. But All the Living and the Dead is surprisingly cheerful, even life-affirming. This is partly thanks to Campbell’s open-hearted, observant style of writing, which manages to be vivid without sensationalizing the horrors she records.... Campbell’s gripping study offers a compelling reminder that the dead, and those who care for these most vulnerable of “patients”, are closer than we might have wanted to believe. Late or soon, by our own volition or by natural means, we will all join their number. All of them, all of us, deserve to be seen, honoured and remembered.’ - the TLS
'This is a brave tour through the valley of the shadow. I am happy to welcome Hayley Campbell to the Death community.' Catharine Arnold, author of Necropolis London and its Dead.
“This book about death and about the people whose jobs and whose lives are dealing with death is moving, funny, and liable to unexpectedly cause me to tear up, reading it. It's about the head and the heart of death, about who we are, and is filled with images and moments that will remain in my head until the end. It manages the astonishing balancing act of conveying Hayley Campbell's own fascination with Death, the dead, and the people who deal with death in one or other of its manifestations, while also allowing us to feel what she feels for the living and the dead. A gentle book and like death itself, sometimes an unexpectedly kind one.” - Neil Gaiman
‘Her similes – describing, for example, a complex tumour as wrapping its way down a person’s spine “like the red stripe on a barber’s pole” – beg to be underlined… All the Living and the Dead triumphs in its mission statement: the reflections from the death workers are very unromantic indeed. Campbell draws conclusions, but these are not clichés.’ - New Humanist
"An intriguing, candid, and frequently poignant book that asks what the business of death can teach all of us in the midst of life. Readers will form a connection with Campbell's voice as intimate as her own relationship with mortality.' - Lindsey Fitzharris
'Readers who share Campbell's healthy obsession will appreciate both her meticulous reporting and her marked compassion' - Booklist
'A careful, moving investigation of existential matters told with a keen literary sense and memorable personal insights.' - Kirkus