Heather Morris Books in Order

If you want to begin with her signature love story: The Tattooist of Auschwitz → Cilka's Journey → Three Sisters.
If you like interconnected World War II survivor stories: The Tattooist of Auschwitz → Three Sisters.
If you prefer women centered wartime fiction beyond Europe: Sisters Under the Rising Sun.
If you are curious about Heather Morris's own process and listening: Listening Well.

Heather Morris grew up in Te Awamutu, a small town on New Zealand's North Island, before moving with her family to the nearby community of Pirongia. As a child, she has said she knew almost nothing about the Holocaust, a gap in knowledge that makes the stories she later told all the more striking.

In 1971 she left New Zealand for Melbourne, Australia, where she met and later married Steve Morris. The couple moved back and forth between Australia and New Zealand for several years, raising three children while she studied and worked.

Morris eventually completed a Bachelor of Arts in political science and sociology at Monash University and took a job in the social work department of a large Melbourne teaching and research hospital. She was not a clinician, but she spent more than two decades in an office surrounded by social workers, patients, and families in crisis, learning how much it matters to sit quietly and listen when people are ready to talk.

In the mid 1990s she began chasing a long held dream of writing for the screen. She enrolled in professional scriptwriting courses, attended workshops in Australia and the United States, and wrote several screenplays, one of which was optioned by an Academy Award winning screenwriter. For years she balanced this creative work with her hospital job and family life.

The turning point arrived in 2003 with a single introduction.

That year, while working at the hospital, Morris was introduced to Lale Sokolov, an elderly Auschwitz survivor whose beloved wife Gita had recently died. Over the next three years he shared with her the story of being forced to serve as the camp's tattooist and of the love that grew between him and Gita inside Auschwitz Birkenau. Their meetings were long, detailed, and emotional, and they built the trust she needed to tell his story.

Morris first shaped Lale's memories into a screenplay that did well in international competitions and was briefly optioned for film, but the project stalled. Encouraged by family and early readers, she rewrote the material as a novel, which became The Tattooist of Auschwitz, published internationally in 2018 and read by millions of readers in many languages.

Her work with Lale opened the door to other survivor stories. In Cilka's Journey she follows a young woman introduced in the first novel from Auschwitz to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, drawing on research into women's experiences in the gulag. Three Sisters is based on three Slovakian Jewish sisters who kept a childhood promise to stay together and endured Auschwitz, a death march, and the long effort to build new lives after the war.

Alongside these novels she has also written about what it means to listen to other people's stories.

Her nonfiction titles Stories of Hope and Listening Well look back on her years in the hospital and her friendship with Lale, offering practical reflections on how careful, patient listening can change both the storyteller and the listener.

Now based in Australia, Morris continues to write, speak, and meet readers who bring their own family histories of war and displacement to her events. Her books have been translated into dozens of languages, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been adapted as a television miniseries, extending Lale and Gita's story to a new audience on screen.