JAN MORRIS

“Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.”
- Jan Morris

ABOUT JAN MORRIS

One of the more interesting people on our list of top travel writers is Jan Morris.  Morris is a Welsh journalist, historian and author, known best for her portraits of cities like Venice, Hong Kong, Oxford, Trieste, and New York City, and for the Pax Britannica trilogy on the history of the British Empire.  Morris was assigned male at birth and known as James Morris; she had a sex reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972.  After the war, Morris wrote for the The Times, getting the opportunity to accompany the 1953 British expedition with Edmund Hilary who made first successful ascent of Mount Everest.  Morris was the first to report the success, sending a coded message back to the newspaper to preserve the scoop and to secure a release of the news on the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.  She tells the story of this trip in her book Coronation Everest.  Morris is often referred to as one of the world’s greatest travel writers, both for the quantity of her work and the brilliance of her prose.   

A5 RECOMMENDATIONS - JAN MORRIS BOOKS

OTHER BOOKS BY JAN MORRIS

Over Europe (1991)

Over Europe is a beautiful coffee table book meant to be both viewed and read. The book's purpose is to tell the story of post-war Europe with amazing professional photography and accompanying text by the noted travel writer Jan Morris.  The book was a two year project supported by fourteen top aerial photographers, with some great shots of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Click here to see our review of Over Europe.

GREAT QUOTES:

“Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.”
- Jan Morris

“To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial.  It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music"
- Jan Morris

"At least I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual. I believe in its imaginative qualities and its potential as art and literature."
- Jan Morris

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • Read the Guardian's​ great article on Jan Morris, celebrating her 90th birthday in 2016.
  • Read Michael Shapiro's interview with Jan Morris at her home in Wales in A Sense of Place, a collection of face to face discussions with some the world's best travel writers on their craft and on their inspiration.
  • The story of the transition from James Morris to Jan Morris is by itself a great story, shared by Jan Morris in a revealing book called Conundrum, published in 2006 as one of the earlier honest books on trans-sexuality.  Click here to read the New York Times review of the book.