Tauranga writer Lee Murray is one of a handful of international writers who will feature in a documentary series on horror writers and writing coming from USA’s My Gypsy Life Productions. The US film team, including director Jamal Hodge, has just announced they are coming to Aotearoa to film Lee here at home in Tauranga.
Last week, Lee was shortlisted for the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize, for her unpublished prose-poetry manuscript, Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, which she wrote during the pandemic with the kind support of the Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship. The work examines Chinese women’s diaspora in Aotearoa through the lens of the shapeshifting fox spirit, the huli jing. The prize, which celebrates works with a unique and original vision, will be announced later this month.
Also on the fox spirit theme, Lee is screenwriter of Grafted (with Mia Maramara, Hweiling Ow, and Sasha Rainbow), a Murray Francis/Leela Menon feature film currently in production in Auckland from Bafta-nominated director Sasha Rainbow.
A four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award for horror writing (fiction, poetry, anthology, collection), and New Zealand’s only recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award, Lee is currently shortlisted for the eighth time for the prestigious international award, this time for non-fiction.
