My Katherine Mansfield Project

‘It amalgamates memory and fiction and research and journal so sensitively and in such an original way that I came away feeling Gunn had escaped all the old hackneyed ways of writing about influence and created something wholly her own… It really lives. All of it.’

‘My Katherine Mansfield Project is a book to be treasured by anyone who has left home and moved away… [it] is an enchanting - and at times haunting - essay, as well as a moving tribute to Mansfield. The publisher, Notting Hill Editions, specializes in “reinvigorating the essay as a literary form”, and Kirsty Gunn’s offering is a triumph of the genre. The book is also a lovely object, stitched with red ribbon, and with a dove-grey cloth cover stamped with striking white-and-red print. Inside, the page numbers are red and chapter titles have red embellishments. It is a tribute to the book as art form; for once, one really can judge a book by its beautifully produced cover.’

‘A beautiful and mood-provoking book…the writing went into my consciousness and I felt the loneliness, the sadness, the love and identification with Katherine Mansfield…It was beautiful.’

‘Kirsty Gunn is a deep thinker; a maverick, an entertainer, and a great writer.’

Kirsty Gunn has written five works of fiction and three short-story collections. Her novelThe Big Musicwon the New Zealand Post Book of the Year in 2013.The Boy and the Seawas the 2007 Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and her previous workFeatherstonewas aNew York Timesnotable 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.