Jan Morris
(Clevedon, Somerset, 1926) British writer, journalist and traveler of wide international recognition.In addition to a lavish career in literature, she was a military man and a war correspondent, and her innumerable journeys, which she transferred to her books, led her to the summit of Everest.
Jan Morris was born a boy, and his His parents named him James Humphrey Morris.From a very young age, and as she has explained numerous times, she felt "a woman trapped in the wrong body." He studied at Lancing College in Sussex.As a teenager, he showed that he was interested in journalism and worked for Bristol's Western Daily News.
Jan Morris
At that time he experienced the outbreak World War II.He decided to enlist and entered the prestigious British Military Academy at Sandhurst.There he graduated as an intelligence officer and joined active duty in the final moments of the war.At that time James was posted to Palestine (under Great Britain during those years) and Italy.Her years as a soldier were hard, since there she had to hide that she felt like a woman.As he has defined on occasion, "I felt like a spy in a polite enemy camp." But his stay in the army awakened his traveling instinct when he visited various parts of the world with his regiment, such as the Middle East, Malta or Austria.
He remained in the army until 1949.He then entered Oxford to study philology English and returned to journalistic work by participating as editor of the student magazine.That same year he married Elizabeth Tuckniss, with whom he would have five children (one of them would die shortly after birth) and with whom he has shared his entire life since then, although by law they are divorced.
After finalizing his studies at Oxford, Morris went to work for the prestigious newspaper The Times.The newspaper sent him to cover John Hunt's expedition to Everest, and Morris scored one of the great exclusives of the 20th century when he announced the crowning of the summit in 1953.After this professional success, he worked for a season at The Guardian.During these years, and taking advantage of his experience as a correspondent, he began to write the first essays and travel books, such as The Market in Seleukia or Coronation Everest .At that time, he met such influential figures as Che Guevara, the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal or the Sultan of Oman, while covering notable events such as the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in 1961.
But in the mid-1960s he abandoned his journalism career, since he considered that he had taken all the juice, and decided to dedicate himself fully to writing books.He had achieved great critical success with the travel book Venice , for which he received the Heinemann Prize.Morris has always said that the city of canals is one of his favorite places to travel, he considers it a city "with thousands of images to crystallize" and has always surrendered to its melancholic air of an old empire.
Another of his great works on travel was Cities , published in 1963 and which included numerous articles published in various magazines and newspapers such as Rolling Stone or The New York Times.In 1964 he published a travel book in Spain, after having traveled the whole country with his wife and one of their children in a van.They were also the years when he finally decided to feel good about himself and perform the long-awaited sex change.
Morris faced the challenge of changing sex as he took off in his literary career.He began estrogen hormone treatment in the late 1960s and received the unconditional support of his wife.Meanwhile, he also began writing the Pax Británica trilogy, a historical essay on the rise and fall of the British Empire.Its three parts were published in 1968, 1973 and 1978, respectively.
In 1972 he was able to undergo the sex change operation.He had to do it in Casablanca, Morocco, since British doctors advised him against doing it as long as he did not break the relationship with his partner.But Morris refused to do so, since the relationship between the two was very good, and he has always appreciated the support he received from Elizabeth.James Morris contacted the French surgeon George Burou, a renowned expert in the field, and agreed to carry out the operation.Despite the harshness of the intervention, which Morris herself defined as a bloody rape, she finally had the body she had wanted from so young.He changed his name to Jan.
He would relate these experiences in a moving autobiographical book: Conundrum (The Enigma, 1974).His visit to Casablanca, he said, was like visiting a magician: "I saw myself as a fairy tale character about to be transformed.From duck to swan? From toad to prince? It was more magical than any of the those transformations, I answered myself: from man to woman.That was the last city I would see as a man." However, not everyone would welcome the autobiographical story he explained, including some literary critics.
Despite these moments of misunderstanding, Morris managed to recover and continued to write.In the 1970s he continued with his travel stories, among which Places stands out, a compilation of essays on places as different and interesting as India, Ireland, Malta, Capri and Fiji.He also continued his passion for Venice and in 1980 he published The Venetian Empire , a review of the splendid past of the Italian city, which Morris is so fascinated by.The 1980s brought him one of the moments of greatest literary creativity.She published Wales: The First Place (1982) and The Matter of Wales (1984) about her beloved homeland, of which she has always been so proud.
In 1985 he made the leap to the novel, but without losing sight of his traveling spirit.On that date he published Last Letters from Hav , in which he recreated an imaginary city, Hav, which brought together characteristics of the various places he had visited throughout his life and through which the imagination of the writer paraded historical figures as diverse as Marco Polo or Adolf Hitler.Twenty-one years later he published a second novel also dedicated to this imaginary place: Hav .
History was always a constant in Morris's literary production, and on numerous occasions it coexisted with travel stories.A good example of this fusion is Destinations (1980), a work in which he travels to places in moments of special relevance, such as Washington during Watergate or Cairo during the peace talks between Israelis and Egyptians..Eight years later he published Hong Kong , where he once again showed his interest in the imperial sunsets, by describing the atmosphere of the Asian city when the British presence was nearing its end.
On more purely historical grounds, he published a biography of Admiral Lord Fisher, creator of modern battleships for the Royal Navy, a character that Morris has always admired because "he did not care what others thought of him, he was brilliant at his craft., iconoclastic and self-centered, the brightest personality in the British navy since Lord Nelson." He also dedicated a biography to American President Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln: A Foreigner Quest .
From the late 1990s, Morris cultivated his passion for his native Wales and its culture and He was recognized by his compatriots, with individual doctorates honoris causa by the universities of Wales and Glamorgan.At times she defined herself as a republican and a Welsh nationalist.In 2002 he published A Writer's House in Wales , where he explained his decision to live in the country house of his ancestors and reflected on the meaning of being Welsh.In 2007 he published A written world , an autobiography through prints collected during half a century as part of his travels around the world.
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