New Zealand Writers

GUNN, Kirsty

The writing is elegant and understated, characterised by evocative and densely imagistic prose.

Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). [About the Companion entries] GUNN, Kirsty (1960– ), is a short story writer and novelist. She attended Queen Margaret College in Wellington and graduated BA (Hons) in English from Victoria University of Wellington in 1982. She tried to get her stories published in New Zealand, but found editors were ‘only interested in New Zealand stories’; hers lacked this exclusive focus. She left soon after graduation and two years later completed an MPhil at Oxford.

Gunn then moved to London, where she now lives. Here she continued to write fiction while holding a string of temporary jobs: writing feature articles, fashion columns, film reviews and agony aunt columns for magazines such as Vogue, Brides and Setting Up Home, writing advertising copy and direct mail leaflets; and for some time she was the London correspondent for More magazine (NZ).

Overseas editors were more willing to recognise her talent. Her stories were published in various Serpent’s Tail anthologies and three stories were published in First Fictions 11 (Faber and Faber, 1992): ‘The Swimming Pool’, ‘The Hook’ and ‘Grass, Leaves’. Gunn’s first novel, Rain (Faber, 1994), was extremely well received here and abroad. New Zealand readers clearly recognise the Lake Taupo setting. Narrated in the first person by a girl on the cusp of adolescence, it is a story about familial breakdown, parental betrayal and the death of a much-loved younger brother. The writing is elegant and understated, characterised, as in her other fictions, by evocative and densely imagistic prose.

The award of a London Arts Board Literature Award in 1995 enabled Gunn to write full-time. Her second novel, The Keepsake (Granta, 1997) is again written in first-person, spare and imagistic prose. It records the fragmented memories of its female narrator, again figuring memory as a creative and redemptive act. Remembering allows the narrator to rewrite the painful stories of her past, a past which is closely linked to—but finally separable from—that of her abusive mother. The Keepsake has also been well received in the USA.

KWo

Updated Information

Kirsty Gunn's latest novel is Featherstone, 2002, a novel about faith, hope and need, but most of all about love and what love means.

In 2001 a film adaptation of Rain was directed by Christine Jeffs.