Michael Morrissey (writer)

Michael James Terence Morrissey (Michael Morrissey) (born 1942) is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, editor, feature article writer, book reviewer and columnist. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a memoir and three short novels and he has edited five other books.

Work

Michael Morrissey was educated at St Peter's College, Auckland and studied law and English literature at the University of Auckland. In 1967, he was the editor of Craccum, the University of Auckland student newspaper. In the 1970s, he began publishing short stories in Islands and Mate and later contributed stories and poems to literary journals such as Landfall, Morepork, Climate, Poetry New Zealand, Listener, Pilgrims, Rambling Jack, Printout, brief, Bravado, Comment, Echoes, Tango, Cornucopia, IKA,Takahe (New Zealand); Blackmail, Trout (New Zealand online), Ocarina, Literary Half Yearly (India); New Poetry, Poetry Australia, Mattoid, Inprint (Australia); Gargoyle, Fiction International, Chelsea (United States); Percutio (France).

In 1979, he was the first Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury and in 1985 the first New Zealand participant in the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa from which he earned an Honorary Fellowship in Writing. In 1986, he was the New Zealand delegate at the 48th World Congress of International PEN. While in New York, Morrissey met many famous writers. Subsequently, he wrote obituaries based on personal encounters with Saul Bellow (7 May 2005), Kurt Vonnegut (28 April 2007) and Norman Mailer (1 December 2007) – all published in the New Zealand Listener. He has also written accounts of encounters with Samuel Beckett and Susan Sontag.

A Fulbright Cultural Travel Award in 1981 enabled him to visit several leading American universities where he studied the teaching of creative writing. On his return to New Zealand, he founded the Waiheke Summer Writing School which ran from 1983 to 1991. He has taught creative writing through several Community Education Centres, and Continuing Education, University of Auckland, and was a tutor at the New Zealand Institute of Business Studies, Auckland between 2008 and 2010.

In 2012, he was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waikato.

His anthology The New Fiction (1985) was the first anthology of New Zealand postmodern fiction. His 80 plus published short stories vary from neo-social realism to surreal and postmodern styles and also deploy the introduction of famous personalities into the New Zealand landscape such as Jack Kerouac, Charles Fort, Andy Warhol and Franz Kafka. His fiction has been translated into Mandarin, Japanese and Hungarian.

Morrissey's short stories have been widely anthologised, including in All the Dangerous Animals Are in Zoos (1981), New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (1983), I Have Seen the Future (1986), Metro Fiction (1987), Antipodes New Writing (1987), Short Story International (1987), Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (1989), The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories (1992), The Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories (1994), Rutherford's Dreams (1995), Essential New Zealand Short Stories (2002 and 2009).

A short film by Costa Botes of one of Morrissey's stories, Stalin's Sickle, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, in France, in 1988.

Michael Morrissey has published four books of fiction and 11 books of poetry. A fifth work of fiction, Tropic of Skorpeo, a satiric sci-fi fantasy in thriller mode, is due for release in October 2012.

Morrissey's memoir, Taming the Tiger^[1] (2011) documents his experiences with bipolar disorder, graphically describing two serious bipolar episodes and his forced hospitalisation. These episodes and Morrissey's mania were the subject of a feature-length documentary, Daytime Tiger, directed by Costa Botes, which premiered at the New Zealand international film festival in 2011. An abridgement of Taming the Tiger in five episodes was read on National Radio on 23–27 July 2012.

Since 2000, Michael Morrissey has contributed a monthly book review column to Investigate magazine (since renamed and reformatted as HIS/HERS). He has also reviewed books for Listener, Landfall, Islands, The Sunday Star-Times, the New Zealand Herald, The Press, Printout, and Quote Unquote.

Bibliography

Awards

• MacMillan Brown Prize (1977)
• Writer's Bursary (1977)
• Writer-in-Residence – University of Canterbury (1979)
• Tom-Gallon Trust Award (1979)
• Fulbright Cultural Travel Award (1981)
• PEN Best First Book of Prose Award (1982)
• Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition (1984)
• Lilian Ida Smith Poetry Award (1986)
• Writer-in-Residence – University of Waikato (2012)

Morrissey was also awarded major project grants by Creative New Zealand in 1993 and 1998.

Further reading

An extended interview with Michael Morrissey can be found in Landfall 146.^[2] There is an account of Morrissey's career in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature.^[3] Poetry New Zealand 37 includes a critical study by John Horrocks of his work,^[4] while Morrissey’s fiction is the subject of an extended essay by Lawrence Jones in his book Barbed Wire & Mirrors Essays on New Zealand Prose.^[5] An interesting perspective of the diversity of Morrissey's writing and his career can be found in Jack Ross' blog Imaginary Museum http://mairangibay.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/two-writers-2-michael-morrissey.html. Morrissey was interviewed by Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand about his memoir Taming the Tiger on 28 May 2011.

References