Rosie Morris was born, and relinquished, in a Manchester mother-and-baby home in 1960. Adopted into a loving and creative family, a new belonging was rooted into that first fracture. A tangle of relationships with her adoptive and biological families – the nurture and nature of it, the dense and thorny and multilayered tapestry of it – is now finding expression in Rosie’s work.
She writes stories and poetry of belonging and unbelonging, connection and disconnection, acceptance and abandonment, love and fear. Of coming home and being displaced. And also of ageing, of the bodily and emotional experience of older womanhood.
Raised in the then vibrant (now mostly derelict) industrial city of Stoke-on-Trent – its landscape and people have been one of her great loves – Rosie subsequently lived in London and Warwickshire before moving to Ireland in 1993. She has lived in Cork for most of the past three decades. She raised her two children as a lone parent. Motherhood brought and brings Rosie profound joy and a sense of ineffable privilege. This too has permeated much of her writing.
For decades, Rosie stymied her creative yearnings. But longing will out. She began writing in her 50s, as her children became adults and after surviving a relationship of abuse and coercive control. Writing as testament. Writing as therapy. Writing as creative release and joy. Aged nearly 60, Rosie finally joined an online writers’ group, learned about submission opportunities and pathways – all this was unknown territory – and began to submit her work. She quickly won prizes and got published.
In 2021, she successfully applied for a Munster Literature Centre mentorship (with Danny Denton) for her novel-in-progress. In early 2022, she linked with three fellow mentees to establish The Four Faced Liar literary and art journal in Cork. During this time, Rosie was also working with women impacted by homelessness, which included developing a number of projects in partnership with The Glucksman Gallery in Cork. Rosie’s short stories, flash, CNF and poetry have been published by The Honest Ulsterman, The Storms, Sonder, Cranked Anvil, Lunate, Strands Publishing, WestWord, Michael Terence Publishing and others. She has been placed, shortlisted or longlisted in many competitions.
Rosie’s working life has been mostly in the community sector. She is passionate about equity, inclusion and social and climate justice. This includes working to make space for and nurture the voices of minoritised people, including emerging older writers. With reluctance, Rosie stepped away from The Four Faced Liar in early 2025, after co-editing the first three issues, to return to her own neglected writing.
She has recently established reciprocal workshop/feedback arrangements with several published writers, enrolled in courses, and begun to submit again. Alongside writing, Rosie has begun to explore visual art, particularly collage. She is planning to run ‘developing the creative self’ workshops for older woman. She also recently organised a very successful centenary retrospective of her father’s photography, in Stoke-on-Trent.
