Paula Jane Kiri Morris MNZM (born 18 August 1965) is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer editor and literary academic.

In 2001 she moved back to New Zealand to join the MA in Creative Writing programme at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was taught by Bill Manhire.

[17] Morris's MA dissertation project at Victoria University won that year's Adam Foundation Prize[18] and became her first published novel, Queen of Beauty (Penguin New Zealand, 2002).

[20] Many of the stories that formed Morris' dissertation project at Iowa, supervised by Marilynne Robinson, are collected in Forbidden Cities (Penguin New Zealand, 2008),[21] which was a finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Prize SE Asia/Pacific region.

[28] Morris has appeared at literary festivals and conferences in the US, China, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and Switzerland, and held a number of writer's residencies, including the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2008 (with Brigid Lowry).

[29] During her tenure as a Sargeson fellow, Morris undertook two editorial projects: The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2008) [30] and an expatriate-writing issue of Landfall.

[38] In 2018, she was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Prize,[39] and in the 2019 New Year Honours she appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.

[43] In November 2021 Morris launched the website KoreaSeen, a platform for reviews and articles about Korean television and film, both classic and contemporary.