For Kirsty Gunn, award-winning fiction writer and professor in creative writing at the University of Dundee, the ambiguities and complications of human life are grist to her storyteller's mill.
Kirsty says her new collection of thirteen darkly compelling stories, set in New Zealand and the UK consider 'how much a person's life can bear'. The final story in the collection All Gone was described by Newsroom as "the most disturbing short story ever to appear in Reading Room".
Pretty Ugly is the inaugural title in a new series of short story collections from Landfall Tauraka and Otago University Press, celebrating the art of short fiction.
Susie spoke to Kirsty who was at her home in London.