NZ author in contention for International Short Story Award

New Zealand author in contention for International Short Story Award

New Zealand author and University of Auckland graduate Paula Morris is in the running for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the world’s richest prize for a single short story.

The award — now in its sixth year, and worth £30,000 to the winner — has always attracted an impressive list of names. Previous winners and shortlisted writers have included the Pulitzer prizewinners Adam Johnson, Junot Diaz and Elizabeth Strout, the double Man Booker-winner Hilary Mantel, and fellow New Zealander CK Stead.

Paula’s story, False River, was announced as one of the 19 short stories on this year’s long list. In an international line-up of writers, she is the only author from the Southern hemisphere in contention for the award.

A shortlist of six will be announced on March 1, with the winner revealed on April 24 at a gala dinner at the Stationers’ Hall in London.

“False River is set in Louisiana, where I used to live,” she says. “It features a number of places very dear to my heart, where I spent time ten years ago, evacuating New Orleans to escape Hurricane Katrina.”

The news comes on the back of a successful year for the award-winning fiction writer. In October and November she had a prestigious Bellagio Residency. The residency programme, established in 1913 by the Rockefeller Foundation, is located in the picturesque Italian town of Bellagio, Lombardy, by the edge of Lake Como.

She also spent the month of July in Denmark, living in the house where author Bertolt Brecht lived in exile during the 1930s.

Now Paula has returned to New Zealand to teach students taking the University of Auckland’s Master in Creative Writing (MCW) course. She will teach students in a two-hour workshop each week, and a two-hour seminar series each week.

“I’m excited to be back at the university,” she says, “and to be living in Auckland, my hometown, after so many years away.”

As if packing for the move hasn’t been busy enough, Paula was also recently commissioned by the Writers Centre Norwich to write a response to a provocative discussion at the Hay Festival Cartagena; this event, bringing together African and South American writers, advocated looking ‘South to South’ rather than to the old centres of publishing, New York and London.

“My response, A World Without Centre: The Illusion of the ‘International’ Book Prize, is part of a longer polemic on the imperial world of book publishing and prizes,” says Paula, who is involved in a new initiative to re-invent the now-defunct Commonwealth Book Prize. “I’m keen to build relationships and opportunities for artists across the Southern hemisphere. Our rugby players travel all the time to South Africa and Argentina. Why can’t we have more cultural and intellectual exchange as well?”

After completing a BA in English in 1985 and a D.Phil at the University of York, Paula entered the music industry. She worked in London, first at BBC Radio 3 and then as a publicist, for both Virgin and Polygram Records. She moved to New York in 1994 to work for BMG Entertainment, initially for ECM Records and later for RCA Victor, where she was vice president of marketing.

But her desire to write continued. She started taking creative writing classes at New York’s West Side Y. She then completed an MA in creative writing at Victoria, followed by an MFA from the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Paula’s first novel, Queen of Beauty (2002), won best first work of fiction at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her most recent novel, Rangatira (2011) won the fiction categories at the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards. Her short story collection, Forbidden Cities, was a regional finalist for the 2009 Commonwealth Prize, and her stories have been published and broadcast in New Zealand, the UK and the US.

Since 2003 she’s taught creative writing at universities including Tulane University in New Orleans, and the University of Stirling in Scotland. Before her return to New Zealand she was Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Sheffield in England.

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