Paula Morris

Life

Morris was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. Her father is a New Zealander and her mother is English; the family's tribal affiliations are Ngāti Wai and Ngāti Whātua. She graduated from the University of Auckland in 1985 with a BA in English and history, and moved to the UK the same year. After completing a D. Phil at the University of York, under the supervision of Hermione Lee, and after a brief stint living in Manchester, she moved to London – working for BBC Radio 3 as a production assistant, Virgin Records as Press Officer for Virgin Classics, and PolyGram (now Universal) as Press and Promotions Manager for Philips.

In 1994 Morris moved to New York to become Product Manager for the German record label ECM, then distributed by BMG. During her four years at BMG Classics she rose to become Label Director of ECM and eventually Vice-President of Marketing for World Music and Jazz.

Morris began taking fiction-writing classes at the West Side Y in 1997, and started making her living from writing two years later, freelancing as a copywriter and promotions manager for The New York Times, writing encyclopaedia entries for Contemporary Black Biography, and also working as a freelance branding consultant. In 2001 she moved back to New Zealand to join the MA in Creative Writing program at Victoria University of Wellington, where she was taught by Bill Manhire.

From 2002–04 Morris attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship (2002–03) and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship (2003–04), graduating with an MFA. In the spring of 2003 she was also the University of Iowa International Program's Writer-in-Residence.

From 2005–2010 Morris was Assistant Professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, moving back to the UK in 2010 to teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland. At Stirling she was program director of the new MLitt in Creative Writing (Prose).

From 2012-2014 she was Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Sheffield.

Her short story "False River" was shortlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the richest prize in the world for a single short story.

Career

Morris's MA dissertation project at Victoria University won that year's Adam Foundation Prize and became her first published novel, Queen of Beauty (Penguin New Zealand, 2002). It won the NZSA Hubert Church Best Book of Fiction at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Many of the stories that formed Morris' dissertation project at Iowa, supervised by Marilynne Robinson, are collected in Forbidden Cities (Penguin New Zealand, 2008), which was a finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Prize SE Asia/Pacific region. At Iowa Morris also worked on two novels – Hibiscus Coast (Penguin New Zealand, 2005) and Trendy But Casual (Penguin New Zealand, 2007) – both of which she completed while living in New Orleans.

Her 2011 novel Rangatira won best work of fiction at the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards. The novel was serialised and broadcast by Radio New Zealand in 2012 and published in German that year by Walde + Graf. It was longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Morris has appeared at literary festivals and conferences in the US, China, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and Switzerland, and held a number of writer's residencies, including the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2008. During her tenure as a Sargeson fellow, Morris undertook two editorial projects: The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2008) and an expatriate-writing issue of Landfall.

She also wrote her first Young Adult novel, Ruined, published in 2009 by Scholastic US. Morris followed this with another YA supernatural mystery, Dark Souls (2011) and Unbroken (2013), which is a sequel to Ruined. Her most recent Young Adult novel is The Eternal City, set in contemporary Rome. In 2013 Morris published her first children's book, the second title in Puffin's New Zealand Girls series: Hene and the Burning Harbour.

During 2014 Morris was awarded two residencies, at the Brecht House in Denmark, and the Bellagio Foundation in Italy. In 2016 she was a writer-in-residence at the Passa Porta International House of Literature in Brussels.