Pretty Ugly Event with Kirsty Gunn - Wednesday 20th November 2024

Join us in the bookshop to hear Kirsty Gunn in conversation with Dan Richards about her collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly.

6.30pm on Wednesday 20th November at Golden Hare Books, 68 St Stephen Street EH3 5AQ.

Buy a copy of Pretty Ugly and receive free entry to the event, or choose our ticket-only option for £5 (which can be used towards a purchase of the book at the event.

About Pretty Ugly

Fiercely conflicting energies are in play in these sparkling stories, as
Kirsty Gunn at once lavishly evokes and savagely destroys the worlds of
propriety and respectable community.

Contradictions (both real and apparent), oppositions, enigmas, provocations,
challenges - this is the kind of material that makes a life, and is the kind
of material that, in fiction, one is never quite sure of. With Pretty Ugly,
Kirsty Gunn reminds us again that she is a master of just such material,
presenting ambiguity and complication as the essence of the storyteller’s
endeavour.

The sheer force of life that Gunn is able to load these stories up with is
both testament to her unrivalled skill and an exercise in what she describes
as ‘reading and writing ugly’, in order to pursue the deeper truths that lie
at the heart of both the human imagination and human rationality.

So here we have all the strange and seemingly impossible dualities that make
up real life - and pretty ugly it can be, as well as beautiful, hopeful,
bleak, difficult, exhilarating. But never, ever dull.

About Kirsty Gunn

Kirsty Gunn has published six works of fiction and three short story
collections. Her books have been translated in over a dozen territories, been
widely anthologised, been broadcast, turned into film and dance theatre, and
have also won multiple prizes and awards including the Edge Hill Prize for
Short Stories, the Scottish Book of the Year, as well as a shortlisting for
the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A regular contributor to
a range of international newspapers and magazines, she is also Professor of
Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, where she established
and directs the writing programme. She lives in London and Scotland with her
husband and two daughters.

About Dan Richards

Dan Richards is an acclaimed non-fiction writer specialising in art, travel and adventure. His first book, Holloway – co-authored with Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Stanley Donwood – was published by Faber and became a Sunday Times bestseller. Dan’s second book, The Beechwood Airship Interviews took a journey into the creative process, headspaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s celebrated artists and craftsman including Bill Drummond, Dame Judi Dench, Jenny Saville, Manic Street Preachers and Stewart Lee.

Climbing Days is an exploration of the writing and climbing lives of Dan’s great-great-aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley and I. A. Richards. Using Dorothy’s 1935 mountaineering memoir as a guide, Dan climbed across Europe, ending with an ascent of the mighty Dent Blanche in the high Alps of Valais.

His latest title is Outpost, a book about far-flung shelters and eyries, isolation and wilderness. Asking what draws people to the ends of the world, Outpost features visits to Cairngorm bothies, French lighthouses, Japanese shrines, Icelandic sæluhús, and polar bears in Svalbard.

Dan’s next book, Overnight, will be published by Canongate in March 2025.