Book Interview: Heather Morris on Sisters Under the Rising Sun

When Heather Morris was 11 years old, she took a strap to a teacher. The woman was beating her brother, John, and Heather was convinced this was wrong. Grabbing her brother by the hand, she ran with him into a nearby forest, and the two of them stayed there until nightfall.

“Everybody was worried,” she says, when we meet at a Dublin hotel. “I boldly went to my parents and said, ‘You don’t get to punish me for what I did. The teacher was hitting John with a strap’. 

They agreed this was wrong and they complained to the school.” Morris has always had a strong sense of justice; and an idea of what is right and what is wrong.

“I’ve always tried to live by that,” she says. “And to never be a victim, never a perpetrator and never a bystander.” 

It’s probably why she became a social worker who spent so much time advocating for patients and their families; probably, too, why since becoming a writer she has always told the real stories of people who have suffered wartime trauma.

She’s in Dublin to discuss Sisters under the Rising Sun her fifth book in as many years. 

Based on a real story, it tells of the Australian nurses who became caught up in the fall of Singapore in 1942, who, after their ship was sunk, ended up in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp. 

Incarcerated with some English and Dutch women, it’s a story of sisterhood, bravery and survival in quite brutal circumstances — and shows how heroic, organised and committed a team of women could be. 

They’re led by the nurse Nesta, Englishwoman Norah, and a Dutch powerhouse named Mrs Hinch. It’s a powerful, emotional read.

Music plays a huge part in the novel. Norah, an English musician, whose eight-year-old daughter, Sally, was evacuated before the fall of Singapore, sets up a voice orchestra, and their concerts lift and enchant both their fellow internees and their captors. 

Some of Norah’s written scores appear at the end of the novel, and a choir in Sydney performed two pieces for the audiobook.

“I met Sally on the island of Jersey,” says Morris. “She was 87, but she had clear memories of the boat trip out of Singapore with all the bombs. And of her time in Australia, and later, going back to Belfast to be handed over to her father’s family, and all the while being told that her parents were dead.” 

Born in New Zealand, Morris worked in a hospital in Melbourne. But when her three children became independent, she decided to try something different.

“I thought, right! I’ll write the next blockbuster film, and I did a weekend course on how to write a screenplay. I wrote a couple of stories of things that happened to me in my work in hospital.” 

Then fate intervened in the form of a Slovakian Jew, Lale Sokolov.

“I was having coffee with a friend, and she said, ‘I’ve got a friend whose mother has just died, and her father is desperate to find someone to tell his story to. He doesn’t want a Jew. You’re not Jewish. Why don’t you tell it?” 

She met Lale multiple times and listened while he told of his time in Auschwitz-Birkenau; of his job, tattooing numbers onto the arriving Jews, and of falling in love with his wife, Gita Furman there. 

Released in 2018, the resulting novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz became a publishing sensation — selling 16m copies worldwide, but Morris had not experienced overnight success.

“It took me 15 years to write,” she says, explaining that much of that time was spent in research, and in trying to sell Lali’s story as a screenplay. She was moaning to her brother and sister-in-law, and losing patience they said, “Just write the bloody thing.” And she did.

We discuss the difference between memoir and fiction, and of how ‘truth’ is a difficult concept in storytelling.

“It’s a tricky one,” she says. “I researched to the hilt, but I couldn’t find two accounts that matched. Everyone’s memory and everyone’s recollections are different.” She has been criticised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for inaccuracies in the plot.

“Historians and academics only want to tell the facts they can prove, but there are personal, individual stories and I felt I had a very good story with Lale so I should be able to tell it from his memory and perspective.” She made it fiction because she wanted to recreate and reimagine the conversations between the guards.

“I wanted to portray what they did after hours; their drunkenness and so on, and on what went on between the girls. In memoir I couldn’t tell it that way. Everything I wrote had to come from Lale or from research.” 

Morris followed her debut with two more stories based on the holocaust — Cilka’s Journey, and Three Sisters. Next came a memoir, Stories of Hope.

She adores the travelling her writing has brought. She talks of the events she has recently done in England, and of how wonderful it is to meet readers who have followed her from the start.

“I will go anywhere, and talk to anyone, anytime,” she says.

There’s nothing glamorous about Morris. Interviewing her is like having a cosy chat with a friend. She swears that the money hasn’t changed her life. She hasn’t splurged on a second home, a yacht, or a private jet; she hasn’t paid off her children’s mortgages.

“They’ve said they’d not accept if I did.” She’s not interested in spending on clothes, telling me that she’s owned the dress she’s wearing for years, and hasn’t changed her bag in ages either. She donates to a charity for children in the third world. And she does have one extravagance.

“I take all the kids across Australia to New Zealand for a winter holiday in the snow to create memories,” she says. “We’ll go a couple of times during school holidays and the kids will be spoilt. They’ll be helicopter rides to the top of the Southern Alps, snowball fights, and a bit of skiing. The five grandchildren, (aged from 11 to four), will all be together.” She says that she’s not disciplined and will never refuse her daughter’s suggestion to go out for coffee.

“I follow William Goldman’s philosophy of telling stories like mine. Research, research, research, then throw the bloody research away and write it. I can’t write when I’m at home and researching,” she says. “I have to be away from the sunshine and the grandchildren.” 

She wrote one novel up a big bear mountain in California: another in New Zealand, and a third, during lockdown, in Tasmania.

“For this one I flew out of Australia on December 31, saw six different new year’s eve’s and landed in London on January 1. I wrote the whole thing in an apartment in Soho.

Morris is 70 this year, but she has absolutely no plans for retirement.

“That word isn’t in my vocabulary. Why should it be? Unless I go gaga next week.” She has three ideas for books — again, based on real stories. “I couldn’t write fiction if I tried,” she says.

When I ask if there’s anything she’d like to add, she tells me she’s really angry at the way the captured women were treated on their return.

“The Australian nurses were welcomed for five minutes, then told to pretend their experience never happened, and the English women were told to stand aside while the men got a welcome on the dock. Women were treated differently just because they were women. I’m really, really angry, and I think it should be acknowledged by the military today.”