Kirsty Gunn

Kirsty Gunn (born 1960, New Zealand) is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and professor of creative writing. She has won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award, the New Zealand Post Book Awards Book of the Year award, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Education and academic career Gunn studied at Victoria University and Oxford University.

She has taught creative writing at Oxford University. and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Literary Fund, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

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

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.

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. The novel took seven years to write, and was inspired by pibroch, the classical music of the great Highland bagpipe.

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

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". The Times Literary Supplement described it as "a clever, sly novel about the nature of the fictional and the real".

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

Gunn has also published works that combine essay, fiction and autobiography, including 44 Things (2007) and My Katherine Mansfield Project (2015) (published in New Zealand as Thorndon: Wellington and Home: My Katherine Mansfield Project).

Awards and nominations Year Title Award Category Result . 2007 The Boy and the Sea Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year 2013 The Big Music New Zealand Post Book Awards Fiction NZ Post Book of the Year James Tait Black Memorial Prize Fiction 2015 Infidelities Edge Hill Short Story Prize — Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award —

Works Novels

Short stories

Other

As contributor, co-author or editor