Heather Morris

Heather Morris was born in Te Awamutu, New Zealand. She grew up mainly in the village of Pirongia, where she lived with her parents and four siblings. As a child, Morris took an interest in storytelling, though her grades were average and she didn’t particularly gravitate toward writing down her ideas. Then, as a young woman in 1971, she moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she met her husband. They couple had two sons and a daughter. After returning to New Zealand to raise their children, the couple moved back to Melbourne in 1987, and in 1991 Morris decided to pursue higher education, feeling as if she had missed out by not attending university earlier in her life. With this in mind, she majored in political science at Monash University and then she went on to work as a social worker between 1995 and 2017. During this time, Morris also studied scriptwriting, which is why she originally tried to develop The Tattooist of Auschwitz into a screenplay when she was introduced to the real-life Lale Sokolov in 2003. Over the next three years, Morris became friends with Lale and she visited him often, listening to his story and gathering the information necessary to tell it to a wider audience. After Morris wrote the tale as a screenplay but she was unable to find anyone to make it into a movie, she decided to turn it into a novel instead. The Tattooist of Auschwitz has now sold over one million copies and it is a New York Times bestseller.