George Gunn was born in Thurso in 1956 where he still lives. He has been a deep-sea fisherman, a driller for oil in the North Sea, a journalist, playwright and poet.
Gunn has been writer-in-residence for a handful of places and institutions, including Orkney Islands Council and for the Scottish Poetry Library at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool. He is well known as a playwright, with over fifty productions for stage and radio; from 1992 to 2010 he was Artistic Director of Grey Coast Theatre Company, which he co-founded. He has produced several series for BBC Radio Scotland and Radio 4; his poems, reviews and essays appear in magazines and newspapers and he contributes regularly to online publications. A book about Caithness, The Province of the Cat, was published in 2015, and a novel, The Great Edge, in 2017.
He has published a number of pamphlets and seven collections of poetry, and After the Rain, a selected poems, appeared in 2018.