PRosé with special guest Heather Morris

Heather Morris’ novels have sold more than eight million copies worldwide, but she never envisioned herself as a novelist. She was very intent on getting her screenplay turned into a movie, until, she says, one day her sister-in-law told her to “write the thing as a book and get on with it.” Morris did, despite having no idea how to write a novel, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz, based on her interviews with Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov, went on to be an international bestseller.

Heather Morris talked to Prose (from her government-mandated quarantine hotel in Australia) about the amazing serendipities that led her to novels, and about her latest novel, Three Sisters, which tells of the harrowing true events of three Slovakian sisters’ survival of the holocaust.

The story for the book Three Sisters came to Morris “in the most amazing way” she says. “I was on a book tour in South Africa, staying in a little wine region just outside Cape Town. I came back from a night in the wineries and read an email about 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning. It was from a man who lived in Toronto, Canada, he said ‘I picked up a copy of The Tattooist of Auschwitz to take it to read on the plane to visit my mother in Israel’. Morris explains, “the Canadian cover of The Tattooist of Auschwitz has the same cover as in Australia, a black cover with just two arms coming down from the elbow and the two tattoos on each arm, of Lale and Gita.”

“He got to his mom’s house in Tel Aviv and left the book on her coffee table. She walked past, looked down on it and said, to him, oh, that must be about Gita. How do you know that? Said the son. ‘Well, look at the number on the arm of the girl, now, look at mine, they are three apart, Gita was two in front of me, and one in front of Cibi — which is her sister; from there he told me about how his mom and his aunts grew up with Gita, went to school with Gita, and went on the train with Gita to Auschwitz.”


In just a few days, Morris flew to Israel to meet Magda and Livia, and this connection would eventually lead to her writing the sister’s survival story. This amazing connection would eventually lead Morris to write Three Sisters.


Listen to the PRosé podcast for more from novelist Heather Morris on her works of historical fiction, and other genres.