Michael James Terence 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 thirteen volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a memoir, two stage plays and four novels and he has edited five other books.
Writing
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, Phantom Billstickers, (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); Kunapipi (Denmark).
Literary career
Michael Morrissey has published five books of fiction and 13 books of poetry.
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 in New York. 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, published in Brief magazine.
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.
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.
Morrissey's novel, Tropic of Skorpeo, published in 2012, is a satiric sci-fi fantasy in thriller mode.
Since 1992, Morrissey has been a regular reader at Poetry Live Auckland (a weekly poetry reading set up by poet David Mitchell in 1980 and held at Auckland's Thirsty Dog). The poems he read at those events have been published in the Poetry Live Auckland anthologies. He has also read at Lopdell House Gallery's Rhythm and Verse events.
Morrissey's memoir, Taming the Tiger (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 RNZ National Radio on 23–27 July 2012.