The sudden, unexpected and untimely passing of novelist Kelly Ana Morey (KAM to her friends) after a short illness, hits hard.

We had been friends for years - largely via social media, email and the occasional catch up when I was up in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. I even got a kind and generous acknowledgment in the notes to her 2016 Phar Lap novel - Daylight Second - for helping out with some of the historical details. 

She was always available to give suggestions in return (I suck at natural-sounding dialogue, which is something that she excelled at), and partly at my request, joined the editorial board of takahē as our essays editor just this year. 

Her loss carves a big hole in the guts of contemporary Aotearoa literature, and we are indeed blessed that we have her beautiful books and stories, a precious tiny hoard of poems, her telling of other people’s histories, and her incisive critical assessments. If it was crap, she told you so.

Of Ngāti Kurī, Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri, and Pākehā descent, KAM was smart about the human condition and had a sharp intellect - with a BA in English and a MA in contemporary Māori art, followed by an MA.Lit. 

Her short story 'Māori Bread' featured in the first Tandem 100 Short Short Stories anthology and 'another short story, ‘The Gardenia Tree' appeared in the fourth edition of that series. KAM was a master of the short story. In 1997 ‘Tangiweto’ was a finalist in the Huia Māori Writing Awards and appeared in that year’s Huia Anthology of Māori Writing. She appeared again in the 2001 edition with ‘Cartography'. She could also turn her hand to poetry and three of her poems were published in Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poetry in English - she would have been the first to admit that poems didn’t come naturally and her metier was prose. She also had poetry in the Puna Wai Kōrero: An Anthology of Māori Poetry in English published in 2014.

Born in 1968 and raised partly in Papua New Guinea - a fact that provided much of the authenticity and detail of her 2010 novel Quinine - KAM’s early life was marked by cultural plurality and intellectual curiosity. Her prose was sharp, witty and lyrical, never ornamental, and every new novel pushed the boat out further in her experimentation. 

Eventually, the short stories didn’t offer a big enough paddock to trot around in and broader literary horizons beckoned with bigger canvases. Her debut novel Bloom (2003) won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award and the Montana first novel prize - praised for its atmospheric prose and emotional depth. Grace is Gone (2005), a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize, confirmed her as a distinctive voice - one capable of blending populist storytelling with literary nuance. 

I think my favourite of KAM’s novels - and according to her, hers too - was On an Island, with Consequences Dire (2007), brutal and melodramatic in the best possible way. It’s a haunting, nonlinear, fragmentary death vision of a novel that traces the unravelling of three women's friendships after a traumatic disappearance during their youth, revealing how memory, guilt, and buried truths resurface to shape their adult lives. It’s crying out to be made into a movie. 

Along the way, KAM was a gun for hire for local histories (Service to the Sea, the Royal New Zealand Navy's history, was one of her projects) and a brilliant essayist. In 2005, she received the inaugural Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Imaginative Fiction, and in 2014, the Māori Writer’s Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. 

Her credentials were clear, and her talents undisputed among New Zealand’s closeknit community of Gen X writers, though at times it seemed as though the broader Aotearoa reading public was less aware of her extraordinary books than it should have been.  

For all of her phenomenal literary talents, KAM wasn’t always particularly good with people. She could be unpredictably touchy and could be cutting, but you just rolled with it because it wasn’t personal. 

Despite presenting herself as hard-boiled, her occasional prickliness was camouflage for her vulnerability and sensitivity - the characteristics that made her such a wonderful writer. She was always observing and absorbing what made other people tick, but the lion’s share of her affections were reserved for her extended menagerie of animals: her miniature Italian greyhounds, her ponies, and her cats, in that order. She loved her critters for all their quirks and foibles, and they were, to all intents and purposes, her family. 

She loved her Kaipara property and its extensive garden. Kaipara suited her, its quiet remoteness fitting with her introspective and landscape-attuned writing. It wasn’t just her home, it was her bastion of psychic resonance, her sanctuary and tūrangawaewae. It was where she was safest and happiest, surrounded by her animals, unapologetically smoking her rollies.

Actually, she did everything unapologetically. Not in the performative sense, just as fact, as she was, being. She lived as she found, spoke as she thought, wrote as she saw. There was no hedging, no softening, very little explaining. Her work carried that same clarity and fierceness. What you saw is what you got. 

Ave atque vale, Kels, hail and farewell. We will miss you terribly - not just for your writing, but your blunt, unpolished honesty, your wit, and your wisdom. You made the world more beautiful, yes, but also more comprehensible, more bearable. And your words will stay with us forever.