Kelly Ana Morey (1968-2025) of Ngāti Kūrī, Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri and Pākehā descent, was a critically acclaimed writer of novels, short stories, poems, essays and non-fiction.
She spent much of her ‘ridiculously magical and intensely imaginative’ childhood in Papua New Guinea and her teenage years ‘located between the maunga and the sea in Taranaki. Watching.’
She gained a BA in English and a MA specialising in contemporary Māori art, followed by a MALit, and was a graduate of the University of Auckland creative writing class. She also worked towards a PhD on the use of museum collections in contemporary New Zealand art.
Bloom (Penguin, 2003), her debut novel, won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. She went on to produce four more novels: Grace is Gone (Penguin, 2005); On an Island, with Consequences Dire (Penguin, 2007); Quinine (Huia, 2010); and Daylight Second (HarperCollins, 2016).
In 2003 she was the recipient of the Todd Young Writers’ Bursary. She was awarded the inaugural NZSA Janet Frame Literary Award in 2025. She made use of the Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in 2014 to write Daylight Second and the 2023 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship to work on a sixth novel, currently unpublished.
Several short stories and a small selection of her poems have appeared in collections, though according to Morey, ‘brevity never came naturally’. Her story ‘Maori Bread’ featured in 100 Short, Short Stories edited by Graeme Lay (Tandem, 1997) and ‘The Gardenia Tree’ appeared in the fourth edition of the same series. Later published stories include ‘Poor Man's Orange’ in Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti (Vintage, 2017) and ‘Reasons why I called in sick rather than go to the mihi whakatau for new employees last Friday’ in Te Awa o Kupu, edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong (Penguin, 2023)
As the oral historian for the RNZN Museum, Morey wrote Service to the Sea (Penguin, 2008), a history of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Other non-fiction publications were How to Read a Book (Awa Press, 2005) and St Cuthbert's College: 100 Years (St Cuthbert's College, 2014). She also wrote criticism – art and literary – and features, reviews and essays for newspapers and magazines.
Morey spent her final years on a rural property in Kaiwaka, Northland, where she maintained a soft spot for Jack Russell terriers, Italian greyhounds, other people’s writing, the New Zealand thoroughbred, star gazing and the various ghosts and characters she carted around in the bottomless kete of her imagination.
