‘The declamatory return; a homeland as a “wearying enigma”. This all makes sense to me. The New Zealand that’s home to me may be a place of sheep and rugby and number-eight wire, whatever that is, but it’s also none of those things. Am I still a New Zealander?’ Award-winning writer Paula Morris confronts long-standing fears of what it means to return home. Is ambition and adventure being traded for a ‘forever home’ of commitments and compromises? Will she still belong? And will the belonging impose its own restrictions? Morris seeks answers in the words of writer exiles as she narrates her own return to New Zealand. Now a settler not a visitor, she questions incisively the very idea of ‘belonging’.
Author
Paula Morris, a novelist and short story writer of English and Maori descent, was born in New Zealand. For almost a decade she worked in the record business in London and New York. She now lives in New Orleans, where she teaches creative writing at Tulane University. Paula's first novel, Queen of Beauty, won best first work of fiction at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Hibiscus Coast, a literary thriller set in Auckland and Shanghai, was published in 2005 and has been optioned for film. Her third novel, Trendy But Casual, was published by Penguin New Zealand in 2005. Paula's first short story collection, Forbidden Cities (2008) was a regional finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Ruined, her first YA novel, was published by Scholastic in 2009.
