One of New Zealand’s most strikingly inventive writers and sharpest critics, Scotland-based New Zealand writer Kirsty Gunn is an internationally published and award winning author of short stories, novels and essays. She’s back home with her latest book of short stories, Pretty Ugly, and joins WORD’s Programme Director Kiran Dass in conversation.

Gunn has a knack for bringing compassion and unease for the human condition in equal measure onto the page. Her haunting novella Rain was adapted into the award-winning film directed by Christine Jeffs. Her majestic novel set in the Scottish Highlands, The Big Music, won big at the New Zealand Post Book of the Year and the Fiction award at the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her latest collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly, has been shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.