Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whatua) is an award-winning novelist, story writer and essayist from Auckland. Her most recent books are False River (Penguin, 2017), a collection of her essays and stories; and Shining Land (Massey University Press, 2020), a collaboration with photographer Haru Sameshima about the writer Robin Hyde. She is the editor of the Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2009) and a co-editor (with Michelle Elvy and James Norcliffe) of Ko Aotearoa Tātou / We Are New Zealand (Otago University Press, 2020).

Paula is an associate professor at the University of Auckland, where she is the director of the Master of Creative Writing. She has mentored writers through the NZSA and the Te Papa Tupu Māori Writers Incubator, and also teaches writing at festivals, schools, universities and community programmes in New Zealand and overseas. Paula has been awarded numerous international residencies, and in 2019 was the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow. A former judge for the Commonwealth Story Prize, the Pikihuia Awards and the ARA Historical Novel Prize, she has appeared at festivals in Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, South Africa, the UK and the US, and at events on indigenous writing and publishing in Banff, London and Taipei.