Grayson Bray Morris
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I was born and raised in a small town in North Carolina, in the American South, where I spent my winters buried in books and my summers drinking sweet iced tea and catching crabs in the river.
I wrote my first major opus the year my age hit double digits: 1977, the year Star Wars came out. I sent George Lucas a script for a second movie, first written by hand and then pecked out on the classroom typewriter. It was a pretty stirring script, let me tell you. Sadly, I never heard back. (Hollywood’s a tough nut to crack.) I've kept writing stories ever since.
I left home at 15 to attend the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. After high school, I briefly tried my hand at art, then earned my bachelor’s degree in math with a hefty helping of astronomy and computer graphics. After college, I programmed parallel digital signal processors way down in their geeky little innards.
I met my husband in 1995, and in 2002, we moved to the Netherlands, his home country. From 2002 through 2019 I worked as a freelance translator, with the occasional software project on the side. In 2020 I joined an awesome Dutch tech company as their full-time writer.
In 2022 I took a one-year sabbatical to grow vegetables in the garden, devour good books and lectures, and just generally let solitude's gentle acid dissolve the cruft from five outward-facing decades. Now I'm happily back at work, and volunteering one day per week at the Dutch Council for Refugees, an independent NGO that seeks to protect and defend the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in the Netherlands.
I currently live in the Haarlemmermeer polder: surrounded by tulip fields, a stone’s throw from Schiphol Airport and Amsterdam, and fourteen feet below sea level.