My Katherine Mansfield Project

In 2009, Kirsty Gunn returned to spend the winter in her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, also the place where Katherine Mansfield grew up. In this exquisitely written “notebook,” which blends memoir, biography, and essay, Gunn records that winter-long experience and the unparalleled insight it allowed her into Mansfield’s fiction. Gunn explores the idea of home and belonging—and of the profound influence of Mansfield’s work on her own creative journey. She asks whether it is even possible to “come home”—and who are we when we get there?

Kirsty Gunn has written five works of fiction and three short-story collections. Her novel The Big Music won the New Zealand Post Book of the Year in 2013. The Boy and the Sea was the 2007 Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and her previous work Featherstone was a New York Times notable book and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for literature. Her collection of short stories, Infidelities, was published in 2014 and won the Edge Hill Prize. She is a Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, Scotland.