New Zealand-Australian · b. 1953
Heather Morris turned a chance meeting with an elderly Holocaust survivor into a publishing phenomenon. Born in New Zealand in 1953, she moved to Australia and worked at a hospital in Melbourne, where she met Lale Sokolov—the man who tattooed the numbers on prisoners' arms at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over three years of conversations, she recorded his story: how he fell in love with a woman he tattooed, how they both survived, how they built a life after. The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) was her first novel, written initially as a screenplay. It became an international bestseller, translated into dozens of languages, despite—or because of—its straightforward emotional directness. Sequels and spin-offs followed. Morris represents a kind of accessible Holocaust narrative that reaches readers who might not approach more demanding accounts.