Catherine Chidgey and others pay tribute to 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. 

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.”

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. / Catherine Chidgey

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. 

It was the viburnum with its first cluster burst that made me think of Kelly on the dawn day of spring. Walking down the zig zag path, I remembered the photo I’d posted, asking friends for the name of it when we first moved in. Kelly had been quick to comment, a sliver of her excellent botanical knowledge. Then I wondered if she’d be going to the Lloyd Cole gig in December, and whether I’d get my copy of The Refugees back now that I’m off Facebook and our messages, including my address, are lost to cyber dust.

Like Catherine Chidgey (the most overblown start to a sentence I’ve ever written!), I knew Kelly through FB and Messenger for several years. We’d started out liking each other’s photos of our gardens and dogs – that is, I’d love-heart hers and she’d thumbs-up mine, lol – and then she messaged me out of the blue. I don’t remember the earliest details (no scrolling back now!) but she was supportive of my writing and confident about her own. Kelly would get so excited about the genius of a plot point, character arc or the phrasing of a place and I admired the bold (and well awarded) self-assuredness of her. Plus she just worked so consistently and determinedly hard.

We talked about the state of writers’ festivals, residencies and reviewing in Aotearoa. We agreed that the best residency would be where you were paid to stay in the familiar comforts of your own home because how could anyone write without their dogs? Kelly had the best literary gossip about writers far out of my league but don’t worry – I’ve forgotten it all now. Some of the nicest chats were about the weather out our windows, vintage scores on Trade Me, and recipes involving ginger, garlic, sesame oil and tamari.

As a fellow ‘68 baby who also waited tables for rich pricks and watched ornate city buildings crumble to high finance in the ‘80s, “Meet me at the Melba” is one of my favourite of Kelly’s pieces (commissioned for Reading Room by the also incomparable Talia Marshall). These spring school holidays, I will finally make a start on her novels. In the meantime, the pīwakawaka flit in and out of the bird bath; a korimako licks at the burgundy nectar of the neighbour’s karo tree.

Thank you for our correspondence and FB friendship. Moe mai rā, KAM. / Nicola Easthope

Besides being a novelist and essayist, Kelly Ana was a horticulturalist, photographer, historian, crazy whippet owner, interior designer, rollie smoker, and despite us being friends for years before either of us were published, has always been a big supporter of my work.

I admire her for so many things, digging and the slogging of putting that garden together, let alone how she did her house. By herself, gutsing it out, and boy, did she get rewarded.

The only bad thing about going off Facebook was I missed her jumping into my feed with hilarious cracks. I was touched when she sent a response to Steve Braunias about something I wrote, and he forwarded it to me, and then she got in touch directly to tell me how many views it had, which is the measure of her, looking after other people and thinking of them.

I thought Daylight Second was outstanding, but the world wasn’t interested and I couldn’t even get her an interview in the local rag. As it happens, I still have the letter I sent to her, and it’s the best tribute I have:

“So my highest accolade to you is that I would have been delighted to have given your book as gift for Dad (he died over 30 years ago) that he actually would have valued. So much so that I got a stab – as if I could dial him up from the dead and say, “Read this!”

Not sure if you’ve read Horse with Hat, but if you did you would have got an idea of how hard he was to please, how exacting, and he was a man who listened to Phar Lap’s races on the radio. We were brought up on it. He was a horseman, and an intelligent and demanding reader. And he would have said (almost impossible for him) – it’s right. Right on horsemanship, right on the flavour and language of the Depression, right on the race descriptions.
I’m impressed by how skilfully you juggle technical horse/horse racing details (mud fever, shoeing) for people who don’t know anything much about how training works, how gear works etc. I reckon it’s always hard (well, for me) to gauge what’s fascinating and what’s too much.