Paula Morris (Ngati Wai) is the author of three novels - Queen of Beauty, Hibiscus Coast, and Trendy But Casual. Her short story collection, Forbidden Cities, was shortlisted for best book in the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (SE Asia/Pacific region). Paula, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was the 2008 Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellow. She teaches creative writing at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Read Paula Morris's blog
Read an interview with Paula Morris for The Lumière Reader
BOOKS
Queen of Beauty
Virginia Ngatea Seton leaves New Orleans, where she works as a researcher for a historical novelist, and returns home to Auckland for the wedding of her younger sister. Drawn back into the world of her Pakeha-Maori family, Virginia rediscovers many family stories and legends. She learns how the city of her youth has inextricably changed, as surely as the country of her grandparents is gone forever.
At turns haunting, moving and comic, Queen of Beauty spans three generations. Shifting between modern-day New Orleans and Auckland, as well as New Zealand of the 1920s and 1960s, it explores the fragility of truth, the elusiveness of the past and the burden it places on the living.
Trendy But Casual
Jane Shore, flippant and world-weary heroine, lives in New York City, works in PR and is officially Ugly On The Inside. An unpromising encounter with a bitter stranger, who shouts at her, 'Did anyone ever tell you that you re ugly? Ugly on the inside,' sets the scene for the next few months of her life.
As if Ugly On The Inside wasn't bad enough, Jane's being sidelined at work by the ambitious fashion-victim Lee Munroe; her West Village apartment's being sold; her cousin Frances is going out with her megalomaniac boss; and she's still single – the gorgeous Guy Weaver being taken already.
Is it time for Jane to acknowledge that the Holy Trinity of job, house and man might not pan out quite how she expected? Is it time for her to accept Mr Not-quite-right, a Brooklyn postcode, and that she's reached the less-than-lofty ceiling of her PR career?
Trendy but Casual takes the reader on a madcap ride through the PR scene of hip-hoperas and porn entrepreneurs, and the bars and clubs of Manhattan in Jane's search for love and success.
Forbidden Cities
This story collection by Paula Morris roams the globe and ranges widely in subject matter. From Sunset Boulevard to the beaches of Auckland, from the Bund in Shanghai to the banks of the Danube, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Hammersmith Flyover, from post-Katrina New Orleans to Fire Island . . . the stories of Forbidden Cities explore places of escape, transgression, ambition, delusions, and desire.
Paula Morris interviewed on "Talk Talk"