Kelly Ana Morey of Ngati Kuri, Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri and Pakeha descent, was a critically acclaimed writer of novels, short stories, poems, essays and non-fiction. She gained a BA in English and a MA specialising in contemporary Maori art, followed by a MALit, and was a graduate of the University of Auckland creative writing class. She also worked towards a PhD on the use of museum collections in contemporary New Zealand art. Bloom , her debut novel, won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2004. She went on to produce four more novels: Grace is Gone ; On an Island, with Consequences Dire ; Quinine ; and Daylight Second . In 2003 she was the recipient of the Todd Young Writers' Bursary. She was awarded the inaugural NZSA Janet Frame Literary Award in 2025. She made use of the Maori Writer's Residency at the Michael King Writers' Centre in 2014 to write Daylight Second and the 2023 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship to work on a sixth novel, Ordinary People Like Us.

As the oral historian for the RNZN Museum, Morey wrote Service to the Sea , a history of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Other non-fiction publications were How to Read a Book and St Cuthbert's College: 100 Years . She also wrote criticism - art and literary - and features, reviews and essays for newspapers and magazines. Morey spent her final years on a rural property in Kaiwaka, Northland, where she maintained a soft spot for Jack Russell terriers, Italian greyhounds, other people's writing, the New Zealand thoroughbred, star gazing and the various ghosts and characters she carted around in the bottomless kete of her imagination.