Extraordinary journalist
Jan Morris, an extraordinary journalist, Welsh historian, author and travel writer published a book Battleship Yamato: Of war, beauty and irony (2018) to mark her 91st birthday, in which she has shown us the world. She is known for the Pax Britannia trilogy (1968-1978), a history of the British Empire, found inspiration almost everywhere, from Vancouver to Venice.
As a soldier in the last days of second world war, and serving in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, and in 1945m was posted to the Free Territory of Trieste, during the joint Anglo-American occupation, and later as a journalist for The Times, The Guardian, and it was Morris who accompanied Hillary and Norgay to the Everest in 1953, and the relayed their success news back to London. She also exposed French involvement in the invasion of Suez in 1956.
Until 1972, she was James, married and father to five children. But she was in “the wrong body” and at the age of 45, an operation in Casablanca put her in the right body. In her book Conundrum, discussing the battle for transgender rights. “ looking back on my life, of course, I had this feeling that I was in the wrong sex and I had to get out of it. But It didn’t occur to me then the ultimate object might be to be both.”
In 1999 Queen’s Birthday Honours , she accepted her CBE and was awarded the Golden PEN award by English Pen for “ a lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature.
In 2001, she promised that she had written her last book her 46th Battleship Yamato, a short tale about the sinking of the world’s largest battleship , and her books about Venice, Oxford, the British Empire, in all she has been an observer of what happens after the heyday. She is broadly proud of the Britain’s Empire, the subject of her three-volume history Pax Britannica, when she met several people who devoted their lives to it without any thought of being bosses or racists.
Morris, born in England of an English mother who was a pianist and Welsh father was Welsh, educated at Lancing College, West Sussex and Christ Church, Oxford.used to live in a old manor house in the hills with her partner Elizabeth.