Paula Morris

Paula Morris (born 18 August 1965) is a novelist and short story writer from New Zealand.

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).

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