"A highly talented author" (Thomas Mobius)
"So intangible" (Ann Smith)
"A deeply imaginative mind" (Tom Slick)
Bell’s voice retains her witty absurdism, but it is complemented by a greater confidence that allows more depth of situation and character. ... What makes a book that includes both ‘Sharpening The Knives’ and ‘The Lost Art of Transportation’ coherent is a shared ethos, a suspicion against the placating comforts of the mundane as and essential dishonesty of the everyday. This is what makes Laissez Faire so unsettling and so worthwhile reading. It’s a series of concentrated and focussed interrogations of the weirdness behind the expected.
Morgan Bell is a young Australian woman, born in Melbourne, Victoria in 1981. She attended primary school in the regional areas of New South Wales, including the Northern Rivers, and the South Coast, and attended secondary school in the southern suburbs of Newcastle. She currently lives in Sydney and works in Local Government as an engineer. Morgan is university educated in civil engineering, traffic engineering, technical communications, linguistics, and literature. She is a member of Hunter Writers Centre, Newcastle Writers Group, and Newcastle Speculative Fiction Group. Her short story "It Had To Be Done" was first published in the Newcastle Writers Group Anthology 2012, and her short story "Midnight Daisy" was published by YWCA Newcastle in 2013 as part of the She: True Stories project, being awarded a Story Commendation at the exhibit launch, and with live readings on ABC 1233 in February 2014 and Newcastle Writers Festival in April 2014. In March 2014 Morgan's short story "Don't Pay The Ferryman", an anti-travel piece, was shortlisted for the Hunter Writer's Centre Travel Writing Prize 2014.
Sniggerless Boundulations
Sniggerless Boundulations
Debut single-author collection (2014)
Laissez Faire
Laissez Faire
Follow-up single-author collection (2017)
.jpg)
Sproutlings: A Compendium of Little Fictions
An anthology of fantasy flash fiction (2016)
Salty Popcorn
Morgan is an occassional film critic and book reviewer for the Salty Popcorn website, the brainchild of Jason King. Morgan and Jason have been blogging buddies from way back and are both opinionated movie buffs.
Movie Reviews
Book Reviews
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower
The Astrologer's Daughter by Rebecca Lim
The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith
The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe by Alexander McCall Smith
The Pleasure of Reading edited by Antonia Fraser
Hush, Little Bird by Nicole Trope
Circling The Sun by Paula McLain
Nein. A Manifesto by Eric Jarosinski
More Letters of Note by Shaun Usher
I Call Myself A Feminist (essay collection)
Mindfulness For Creativity by Dr Danny Penman
Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay
Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler
On Writing by Charles Bukowski
The Interviews
On the blog tour for Sniggerless Boundulations, Morgan Bell has been interviewed or guest-posted on the following sites:
Author Spotlight on Missy Writes
Author Interview on Peace, Love & Writing
Author Interview on Roberta's Dreamworld
Author Spotlight on World of Writing
Author Interview on Bunny's Book Reviews
Book Interview on Lovely Reads
Author Interview on Book Club Reading
Author Interview on Jeanz Book Reviews
Author Interview on Kathryn Elizabeth Jones
My Author Friends Interview on Author Alliance
Interview on Jennifer Douglas Literary Publicist
Australian Author Spotlight on Lauren Dawes
Interview on Fantasy & Sci-Fi Network
Author Interview on Read Freely
Guest Post on Laura Brown (Topic: Mental Illness)
Guest Post on Creative Conversations (Topic: My Desk)
Author Interview on The Pen & Muse
Author Interview on Writers on Wednesday
Author Interview on What The Experts Say (Simply Tips)
Author Interview on Indie Author Land
Author Snapshot on Rowena Holloway
Interview on Authors Interviews
Fan Questions on Indie Author Appreciation Week
Snapshots from Sydney on Words With JAM
Guest Post on Featured Author (Topic: Write What You Know)
Guest Post on Hunter Writers Centre blog (Topic: Comma Splice)
Guest Post on Peter Sutton (Topic: Kickstarting An Anthology)
Guest Post on Sheree Christoffersen (Topic: Getting Back Into Reading
Author of the Month on CJ Rose
Guest Post on KA Denver (Topic: The Power of Independence)
Guest Post on Jeannie Wycherley (Topic: Women In Horror Month)
Newcastle Writers Festival 2016
Sproutlings
Morgan Bell’s Sproutlings is a mesmerising collection of exquisite peculiarities. Welsh and Cornish mythology. Australian campfire tales. Astral and fantastic. The pertinency of forty-three modern authors is punctuated by bites of botanical fiction from Poe, Lawson, Orwell, Lawrence, Wells, Alcott, and Wilde in this tour de force of tiny stories.
.jpg)
Trouble By The Jarful
Morgan has contributed to a Prints Charming childrens story anthology with a middle-school piece called "Trouble By The Jarful", a modern fable about magical jars and the ingredients for generousity.
Cover reveals
Morgan's next collection of short stories is due out in early 2015, it is called Laissez Faire. The third instalment in the flash fiction series will be Tardigradous.
Novascapes Volume 2 (2015)
Upcoming novel - Daughters of Mallory
DAUGHTERS OF MALLORY
Morgan is working (slowly) on a speculative fiction novel: Daughters of Mallory. It is a feminist dystopia with an episodic structure and a third-person narrator, and includes literary charactens from Dickens and Austen and a few fairy tales.
Novascapes Volume 1 (2014)
Morgan contributed a short story to Novascapes, the 2014 Hunter Speculative Fiction Anthology, called “The Switch” which is based on Germanic folklore. It was published 30 September 2014 alongside award-winning authors such as Margo Lanagan and Kirstyn McDermott.
Newcastle Writers Festival 2015
- Sunday, March 22, 2015
- 10:00am 11:00am
- Mulubinba Room
- Newcastle City Hall
- 290 King St Newcastle, NSW, 2300 Australia
Novascapes: Readings by local writers who feature in the Hunter Region’s inaugural speculative fiction anthology.
Hosted by the editor, Cassandra Page.
Free session
Newcastle Writers Festival 2014
Morgan spoke at the She:True Stories session, reciting her story Midnight Daisy. She also manned the Hunter Writers Centre info booth in the Maclean's Festival Bookshop (where Sniggerless Boundulations sold out), and was a volunteer at the signing tables and an escort for fantasy fiction author and icon Kate Forsyth, who left the festival with a copy of Sniggerless Boundulations.
She: True Stories Exhibition Launch
The exhibition for She: True Stories, ordinary and extraordinary, a YWCA Hunter Region Newcastle community portrait project, opened February 14 at the Lovett Gallery. The exhibition was open until until March 22, 2014. Morgan Bell was awarded a prize for her story Midnight Daisy, which was marked as a commended entry in the exhibit.
International Womens Day Art Exhibit
Held at the See Street Gallery at Meadowbank, the exhibition ran from Thursday 6 March to Saturday 22 March 2014. Morgan Bell's art work was entitled "Chastain", a digital print.
-page-001.jpg)
Tighes Hill Community Gardens Poetry Prize 2013
Morgan Bell was guest judge for the 2013 Poetry Prize for students of Tighes Hill Public School, sponsored and organised by Tighes Hill Community Gardens. The theme was the community garden, which all the children participate in maintaining. Poems ranged from acrostic to rhyming couplets to haikus. For each year group Morgan selected a shortlist of five poems, which she announced on the day, with the top three of each class receiving a prize of lollies and garden seed packets. The children read their poem live on the day, a warm sunny Saturday, 14 September 2013.
Bell’s prose is clean, minimalist and carefully executed , though she manages to avoid becoming detached or overly abstract
Contact Morgan Bell at [email protected]
Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Author
- Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature
- Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Authors
- Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Australian & OceanianKindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Short Stories