Paula Morris releases candid memoir on moving home

Paula Morris releases candid memoir on moving home

Award-winning author Paula Morris addresses how it feels to move back to New Zealand after decades living overseas, in a new book published by Bridget Williams Books.

Having spent most of her adult life in the United Kingdom and the United States, Morris has recently taken up a post teaching creative writing at the University of Auckland, where she completed her undergraduate degree.

In On Coming Home she interrogates her fears about giving up an expatriate’s life, writing from the heart about what it means to assume the mantle of ‘New Zealand writer’, and considering questions of nationality, displacement and artistic inspiration.

‘I used to be afraid that I would never come home,’ says Morris. ‘But at the same time I’ve never wanted to come home to live because that implied an end to things: growth, movement, ambition, possibility. And I was scared of coming home to Auckland to find that I no longer belonged here.’

In her book, published as part of the BWB Texts series, Morris embraces these fears that have resonance for so many New Zealanders, drawing on her personal experience and those of other writers who have left their native country to live overseas. On Coming Homeis an incisive and engaging commentary on what it means to call a place home.

The Text also discusses the creative beginnings of Morris’s short story ‘False River’, which was recently one of only six stories to be shortlisted for the prestigious Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.

ENDS

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