Kirsty Gunn

Gunn studied at Victoria University and Oxford University.^[1]

She has taught creative writing at Oxford University.^[1] She is currently a Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee^[1][2] and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,^[3] the Royal Literary Fund,^[4] and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.^[5]

Gunn's debut, the short novel Rain, was published in 1994.^[6][7] In 2001, the novel was adapted as both a film of the same name, directed by Christine Jeffs,^[8] and as a ballet by the Rosas Company, set to "Music for Eighteen Musicians", a 1976 score by Steve Reich.^[9]

Gunn's first collection of short stories, This Place You Return to Is Home, was published in 1999 and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature.^[9][1] The collection included a story, 'Tinsel Bright', that was selected for The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories About Childhood in 1997.^[10]

Her fourth novel, The Boy and the Sea, was published in 2006. It won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award in 2007.^[2]

Her 2012 novel The Big Music won the Book of the Year in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards.^[11][12] The novel took seven years to write, and was inspired by pibroch, the classical music of the great Highland bagpipe.^[13]

Gunn's 2014 short story collection, Infidelities, won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize^[14] and was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award.^[15]

Gunn's most recent novel, Caroline's Bikini, was published in 2018. A metafictional romance, The Guardian described it as "bold and brainy" but "frustrating".^[16] The Times Literary Supplement described it as "a clever, sly novel about the nature of the fictional and the real".^[17]

In 2024, Gunn published her third short fiction collection, Pretty Ugly.^[18][19] It was a finalist for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.^[20]

Gunn has also published works that combine essay, fiction and autobiography, including 44 Things (2007)^[9][21][22] and My Katherine Mansfield Project (2015) (published in New Zealand as Thorndon: Wellington and Home: My Katherine Mansfield Project).^[23][24][25]