Catherine Chidgey pays tribute to her friend, writer Kelly Ana Morey who died on September 1, 2025 after a short illness.
When my friend Jo messaged to ask if I was on campus, I thought she wanted to meet for a coffee. I messaged back to say I was working from home – and then my phone rang. “Kelly’s died,” said Jo. I heard my own voice, small and thin, as if in a box: “What? What?” Then the call cut out. When Jo rang back, I stared at the phone for a moment and did not answer. If I didn’t answer, it couldn’t be true.
Kelly and I became friends in 2010, when I had a writing residency at the Pah Homestead in Auckland. I was in a painful creative slump at the time, and we struck up an extended online chat about the pressures and challenges of the writing life. I’d tell her, “I have been stopped in my tracks for a long time,” and she’d fire back pep-talks: “Play to your strengths, believe in your talent, be true to who you are as a writer and write a bloody novel. Honestly it will be all right.”
I now have 15 years’ worth of chats with the extraordinary person that was KAM: novelist, critic, art historian, oral historian, photographer, horsewoman, landscaper, Italian greyhound wrangler, and fashionista who kept her shoe collection in an Edwardian vitrine.
Kelly Ana Morey.
Our conversations ranged from current books to vintage lamps, badly behaved pets to badly behaved writers, the pleasures of quality linens to the lush garden she drew from the bare clay around her Kaipara home. She possessed the driest wit. Of a reviewer who had made borderline misogynistic comments about our first books: “Maybe we should have a whip around and take him to the vet to be neutered. I’m sure there would be plenty of donors, he’s always trying to hump some poor woman’s leg.”
In the early days we played online Lexulous (a Scrabble knock-off) with two respected New Zealand composers; the C*** Rule applied, in that if you could play the C-word, you were honour-bound to do so, no matter how little it would score. KAM and I talked trashy TV as a way of decompressing from the rigours of producing literary fiction, and we congratulated each other on the antique furniture bargains we ferreted out on Trade Me.
A country girl, she was obsessed with rainfall, storms, the number of days left until spring. She was a constant presence in my life, just on the other side of my screen whenever I needed to vent about writing or have a snarky laugh, and I can’t quite believe that long conversation has ended. I know she had similarly extended conversations with many others, offering them her particular brand of friendship and support.
I’ll never forget the experience of reading her prize-winning first novel Bloom. How I loved, in particular, the character of Nanny Smack, a ghost and a Hauhau witch, who crochets tomorrow’s skies. How I wished I could come up with something half as original. Scrolling through our chats, I found a comment from last September: “When I die there will be a box of unpublished novels under my bed. Sort those out for me.”
Some of Kelly Ana Morey’s publications.
I know that she had just finished a new book, which we’d discussed at length over recent years – its official title is Ordinary People Like Us, but we called it her “Epic Māori Novel”, or EMN. She was excited about it; with its taniwha and ghosts, it returned, she felt, to the energy of Bloom. She had no interest in producing a novel featuring “Māori trauma porn”; this book, she said, was “a quirky black comedy about life, rubbish relationships and death featuring five generations of really quite ordinary Māori women and their choices as they navigate their way through a century of social change”. It would be “the bougiest Māori novel ever written”.
I do hope it finds its way to her readers, and that her singular voice lives on through her characters – she can’t leave us just yet. KAM was kind and wicked, classy and irreverent, fiercely loyal, whip-smart, hilariously funny. She was a one-off, and I will miss her terribly. I keep finding myself about to message her regarding the current unacceptable state of affairs: “WTF are you playing at, chook, being dead? Get back here this instant.” Or: “I’m ugly-crying and it’s all your fault, bitch.” Or: “You’re everywhere, baby. All over the internet.” And she’d reply: “Fame at last.” Or something equally pithy and wry and self-deprecating.
KAM died on the first day of spring – that season she waited for so eagerly each year, counting down the days on our newsfeeds, anticipating a gentler time. And look, my friend: the magnolia heavy with blossoms. The grass so green it hurts. The light stretching out.
Photograph by Kelly Ana Morey.
If you would like to pay tribute to Kelly Ana Morey, please email clairemabey@thespinoff.co.nz; we will add tributes on this page as they flow in.