Paula Morris
Paula Morris MNZM (born 18 August 1965) is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer, editor and literary academic. She is an associate professor at the University of Auckland and founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
She was born and raised in Auckland. Her father is from New Zealand and her mother is English; she has Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri and Ngāti Whātua heritage.
Morris earned a BA in English and history from the University of Auckland in 1985. She then moved to the United Kingdom to study, writing a DPhil at the University of York under Hermione Lee. After working in the UK’s music and broadcasting industries, she moved to New York in 1994 and held high-level roles in the music business before turning to fiction writing in 1997.
In 2001 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. She then attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (2002–2004), where she received the Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and was Writer-in-Residence in 2003.
From 2005 to 2010 she was an assistant professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, then taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland (2010) and was a writer-in-residence at the University of Sheffield (2012–2014). Since 2015 she has been at the University of Auckland, where she leads the Master of Creative Writing program.
Morris’s work has earned several awards. Her debut novel Queen of Beauty (2002) won the Adam Foundation Prize and the NZSA Hubert Church Best Book of Fiction (2003). Forbidden Cities (2008) was a Commonwealth Prize finalist. Rangatira (2011) won the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Best Work of Fiction and the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Award for fiction in 2012. Her collection False River (2017) includes the title story that was shortlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her young adult novels include Ruined (2009), Dark Souls (2011) and Unbroken (2013). The Eternal City and Hene and the Burning Harbour (2013) are other notable works.
Morris has held many residencies, including the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship (2008) and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Prize (2018). In the 2019 New Year Honours she was named a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.
She has also worked as an editor and editor-in-chief. She co-edited Ko Aotearoa Tātou (2020) and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (2021). In 2020 she collaborated with photographer Haru Sameshima on Shining Land: Looking for Robin Hyde, which was longlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2021 she launched KoreaSeen, a site for reviews and articles about Korean film and television.
Paula Morris continues to teach and write, and she directs the Master of Creative Writing program at the University of Auckland.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 04:21 (CET).