Forbidden Cities

Paula Morris was born on August 18, 1965 in Auckland, New Zealand. She is a novelist and short story writer. She graduated from the University of Auckland in 1985 with a BA in English and history. After completing a D. Phil at the University of York, she moved to London working for BBC Radio 3 as a production assistant. In 1994 Morris moved to New show more York to become Product Manager for the German record label ECM. Morris began taking fiction-writing classes at the West Side Y in 1997, and started making her living from writing. In 2001 she moved back to New Zealand to join the MA in Creative Writing program at Victoria University of Wellington. From 2002-04 Morris attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received the Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. Morris's MA dissertation project at Victoria University won that year's Adam Foundation Prize and became her first published novel, Queen of Beauty. It won the NZSA Hubert Church Best Book of Fiction at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Many stories that formed Morris' dissertation project at Iowa, are in Forbidden Cities which was a finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Prize SE Asia/Pacific region. At Iowa Morris worked on two novels Hibiscus Coast and Trendy But Casual. Her 2011 novel Rangatira won best work of fiction at the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards. In 2015 she was in the running for Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a single short story for her story False River. The award is £30,000. (Bowker Author Biography) show less