Kirsty Gunn is a New Zealand born fiction writer living in London and Scotland whose work has won numerous awards and been made into films, broadcast, theatre, dance and widely broadcast. Published in multiple countries internationally, her novels and short stories focus on ordinary lives and relationships and seek to show within the day-to-day those shocking moments of intimacy and tiny drama that make up human experience. ‘I am fully in love with Kirsty Gunn’s stories,’ Jane Campion writes. ‘They hit the heart of life so truly it makes me quiver.’

Kirsty is the author of six novels – Rain, The Keepsake, Featherstone, The Boy and the Sea, The Big Music and Caroline’s Bikini – extended essays and short stories about identity and Katherine Mansfield – Thorndon, My Katherine Mansfield Project and Going Bush – as well as three collections of short stories – Pretty Ugly, This Place you Return to is Home and Infidelities – and 44 Things, a collection of essays, fragments and stories. Her short stories have been included in many anthologies including The Junky’s Christmas and Other Yuletide Stories (1994) and The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood (1997).

Kirsty’s work has been shortlisted for and won many prizes. Her acclaimed story Rain (1994), about an adolescent girl and the break-up of her family, won a London Arts Board Literature Award, and also led to the 2001 film of the same name, directed by Christine Jeffs and the 2001 ballet by the Rosas Company, set to “Music for Eighteen Musicians”, a 1976 score by Steve Reich. Her collection of short stories, This Place You Return To Is Home (1999), won a Scottish Arts Council Writer’s Bursary (2001). The boy and the sea was the 2007 Sundial Scottish Book of the Year and her previous work Featherstone was listed as a New York Times Notable Book and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature. Her book, The Big Music, which comprises artwork, music and a film featuring the well-known Scottish actor Brian Cox, was listed for the James Tait Black and IMPAC awards and won The New Zealand Post Book of the Year (2013).  Her collection of short stories, Infidelities (2014), was awarded the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story Prize and was also shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Kirsty was educated at Victoria University and Oxford. She has a Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee where she established and directs the programme of Writing Practice and Study and directs, with Gail Low, the WritersRead series at Tonic in Dundee. She is also an essayist and publisher of essays; and directs the research centre Imagined Spaces, set up to encourage new work and thinking around the essay form. Her reviews and nonfiction appear in a range of journals and newspapers, including the LRB, PN Review and the Guardian, and her long form essay, My Katherine Mansfield Project, was published by Notting Hill Editions and elsewhere.

In her most recent work Pretty Ugly (Otago University Press, 2024) Kirsty Gunn reminds us that ambiguity and complication are elemental forces in a human life, and grist to the storyteller’s mill. These 13 darkly compelling stories, set in New Zealand and in the UK, are testament to her unrivalled ability to look directly into the troubled human heart and draw out what dwells there. The ‘ugly’ of these stories, she writes, is to do with ‘considering how much a person’s life can bear’. Pretty Ugly was shortlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

 

Links:

Kirsty Gunn’s website

Faber & Faber author page

Otago University Press writer page

British Council writer page

ANZRB review of Pretty Ugly (Nov, 2024)

Radio NZ interview with Kirsty Gunn discussing Caroline’s Bikini (July, 2018)