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Jan 15, 2025 | 
bookanista.com | Kirsty Gunn
THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG with the garden. You couldn’t see it, nothing was obvious. There were no strange plants organised in certain shapes, or sinister looking growths and weeds; the paths were orderly, and the lawns. Roses grew, and pinks, in the places that had been set there for them, and in autumn, berries came out on the crab apple trees along the west side of the wall beside the vegetable plot. It was lovely, actually. Even so, something was not right. And never had been.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
pnreview.co.uk | Kirsty Gunn
Then my eye adjusts; I start to see variety. Next thing, imagination has answered the appearance of a chastened landscape with the gift of its generative powers: so, for example, now here I am, at that same window, looking over, say, an eighteenth-entury English parkland. For that scattering of Highland birch trees down there on the flat could be, easily, in this particular light, on this day, a planting by Capability Brown of mighty oaks.
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Nov 13, 2024 | 
the-tls.co.uk | Isabella Trimboli |Kirsty Gunn |C. K. Stead |Fiona Gruber
In 1962 Charmian Clift put aside her autobiographical novel to help her husband write his. For the past decade, she and George Johnston had been living in Greece, co-authoring little potboilers that barely paid the bills. But then Johnston became increasingly sick from tuberculosis, mortality impelling the need for self-preservation and therefore sole authorship. In their living room Johnston wheezed and wrote while Clift scrutinized every page.
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Sep 14, 2024 | 
independent.co.uk | Kirsty Gunn
I can’t remember when I started reading Katherine Mansfield. I have been reading her all my life – her short stories were read aloud to me by my mother, and then I read her through my school years and beyond – so it’s hard to know when the fact of her meticulously made short fictions was first made apparent to me.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
nzherald.co.nz | Kirsty Gunn
SubscribeHome / The Listener / CultureBy Kirsty GunnContributing writer·New Zealand Listener·28 Aug, 2024 07:00 AM12 mins to readSaveShare this articleReminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read. I think I was in third form when we read Owls Do Cry. There it was.
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Jul 1, 2024 | 
nzherald.co.nz | Kirsty Gunn
SubscribeHome / The Listener / BooksBy Kirsty GunnSaveshareShare this articlefacebookcopy linktwitterlinkedinredditemail A few years ago – though by now this may as well have happened in another lifetime – I was giving a lecture on DH Lawrence’s short story The Blind Man. This was part of an undergraduate course in “Writing Practice and Study” delivered to second-year students who were taking a combination of literature and creative writing modules.
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May 17, 2024 | 
pnreview.co.uk | Kirsty Gunn
Earlier this year I woke in the middle of the night unable to breathe. I lay in the dark, alert, aware of every single intake of air and its expulsion. I was alone. I was in a remote place. There was no one to take me to hospital or order a car or ambulance, and nothing I could do except lie very still and quiet until the episode passed and I could feel my body returning to its nomal resting state.
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May 4, 2024 | 
nzherald.co.nz | Kirsty Gunn
Vincent O'Sullivan (1937 - 2024) Vincent O’Sullivan was someone who could walk into your life and change it. He had that kind of life spirit. Immense generosity. Thoughtfulness. The self-effacement that comes with enormous reserves of sophistication and intelligence and is often read quite simply as kindness. I first met him when I was an English literature student at Victoria University.
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Feb 5, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Kirsty Gunn
“This writer wants to show us that the ugly side of life is life’s necessary hemisphere.” Most of us who enjoy books are largely agreed upon concepts like “good writing” and “clarity and confidence of expression” being fundamental to our delight in the play of words upon a page. We are brought up to learn that conveying our thoughts in “good English” is part of our education in that language, and lines like “well phrased” and “nicely constructed sentences” are generally written in the margins...
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Jan 14, 2024 | 
nzherald.co.nz | Kirsty Gunn
Each summer, we commission some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. Photo / Getty ImagesEach summer, we invite some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. Here is the final instalment on this year’s theme, ‘second acts’. By the time she got up to her room she’d decided she wasn’t going to stay. First thing in the morning it would have to be, because it was too late to leave now.
