Thorndon

‘If I began asking you questions about Wellington ways there would be no end of it …’ Katherine Mansfield

‘I came home to Wellington, to a place half remembered, half real, half fantasy, half fact, remembered and a dream …’ Kirsty Gunn

For London-based writer Kirsty Gunn, returning to the city of her birth to spend a winter in a tiny colonial cottage in Thorndon is an exciting opportunity to walk the very streets and hills that Katherine Mansfield left behind on her departure from New Zealand, but later longed to revisit.

In this exquisitely written ‘notebook’ (‘My Katherine Mansfield Project’), Gunn explores the meaning of ‘home’, both for herself, returning to Wellington after an absence of thirty years, and for Mansfield, whose emotional attachment to the city and her geographically distant family remained a potent imaginative force, spurring some of her finest - and final - work.

For Mansfield, Gunn writes, ‘home was an instant “go-to” zone for invention and narrative and characterisation and setting’. For Gunn, home is now two places - ‘Here and there the same place after all.'