Jan Morris
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Jan Morris CBE (born James Humphrey Morris on 2 October 1926, in Clevedon, Somerset, England, educated at Lancing college, Shoreham, West Sussex, but by heritage and adoption Welsh) is a British historian and travel writer.
She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste and New York City.
Born male, James Morris had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972 and adopted the name Jan. She wrote of her quest for personal identity in her book Conundrum. She has maintained her marriage to Elizabeth Tuckniss since 1949. They had five children, including the poet and musician Twm Morys, but one is now deceased.
Morris served in World War II in British Intelligence and later wrote for The Times. Morris scored a notable scoop in 1953 by accompanying the British expedition which was first to scale Mount Everest.
Reporting from Cyprus on the Suez Crisis for The Guardian in 1956, Morris produced the first "irrefutable proof" of collusion between France and Israel in the invasion of Egyptian territory. He interviewed French Air Force pilots who told him that they had been in action in support of Israeli forces.[1]
Morris lives mostly in Wales, where her parents were from. She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Wales and the University of Glamorgan and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
She accepted her CBE in the 1999 Queen's Birthday Honours out of polite respect, but is a Welsh nationalist republican at heart.
[edit] Books
(Partial list)
- Manhattan '45
- Coronation Everest
- In Search of England
- Last Letters from Hav (novel)
- Fifty Years of Europe: An Album
- The Venetian Empire (1980)
- Fisher's Face
- Oxford (1965)
- The Oxford Book of Oxford (editor)
- The Matter of Wales
- Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest
- Conundrum
- Coast to Coast: A Journey Across 1950s America
- Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
- Hong Kong
- The World: Life and Travel 1950–2000
- Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989)
- Pax Britannica trilogy:
- Heaven's Command
- The Climax of an Empire
- Farewell the Trumpets
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ "Courage Under Fire", The Guardian, 2006-07-10.
