1. Paula Jane Kiri Morris was born on 18 August 1965 and is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer editor and literary academic.
17 Facts About Paula Morris
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Paula Morris is an associate professor at the University of Auckland and founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
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Paula Morris's father is a New Zealander and her mother is English; the family's tribal affiliations are Ngati Wai, Ngati Manuhiri and Ngati Whatua.
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Paula Morris graduated from the University of Auckland in 1985 with a BA in English and history, and moved to the United Kingdom the same year.
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In 1994, Morris moved to New York to become Product Manager for the German record label ECM, then distributed by BMG.
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Paula 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 working as a freelance branding consultant.
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From 2002 to 2004, Paula Morris attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of the Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, graduating with an MFA.
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From 2005 until 2010, Paula Morris was an assistant professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, moving back to the UK in 2010 to teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
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Between 2012 and 2014, Paula Morris was fiction writer-in-residence at the University of Sheffield.
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Paula 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.
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Paula Morris wrote her first Young Adult novel, Ruined, published in 2009 by Scholastic US.
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Paula Morris followed this with another YA supernatural mystery, Dark Souls and Unbroken, which is a sequel to Ruined.
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In 2013 Paula Morris published her first children's book, the second title in Puffin's New Zealand Girls series: Hene and the Burning Harbour.
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Paula Morris has been awarded a number of residencies, including the Brecht House in Denmark, and the Bellagio Foundation in Italy.
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Paula Morris was co-editor of two landmark anthologies of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction: Ko Aotearoa Tatou and, with Alison Wong, A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand.
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In November 2021 Paula Morris launched the website KoreaSeen, a platform for reviews and articles about Korean television and film, both classic and contemporary.
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An associate professor at the University of Auckland, Paula Morris directs the Master of Creative Writing degree programme.